Lady Lazarus Wept
by mmeryll
Summary: Former working title:Purgatory. A tale, as the name would imply, of ethical ambiguity and atonement.A bit of a satire. Eventually HG/SS and hardly canon-compliant after OotP, though incorporating some salient elements from HBP and DH.
1. Sin of Commission

Around her, the water was cool and smooth as she moved slowly through the blue; it wrapped about her limbs softly and burnt her half-opened eyes. Floating in the airless space, she watched many legs, seemingly autonomous from bodies, engaged in a senseless slow motion dance. A low humming had overwhelmed all other sounds and she felt insentient and peaceful.

Suddenly, a spasm of suffocation hit her. She couldn't breathe. When she opened her mouth the air felt solid and she could not swallow it. Hermione convulsed and awoke. Orbs of light blinded her eyes and then dimmed, except for a violet glow directly in front of her face. The light cast relief upon a person silhouetted above her, wand hand outstretched in a menacing gesture.

Through a haze of sleep and looming hysteria, she felt fingers clutch at her hair and pull her out of bed and across the room. The light was on in the hall; it jolted her senses and she lurched away, tripping over an upturned chair. Something had got hold of her wrist; it was twisted behind her. She felt herself pushed forward and glanced about in panic. Stark against the quiet design of the wallpaper was a bloody hand print.

Downstairs, the wood paneled television buzzed static. She noticed this first. She had harbored an absurd hatred of the machine ever since she was a little girl, since the first time her parents shushed her for rambling over the televised voices. She was not sad to see it go.

Also, she could not bring herself to focus on the room at large, for her subconscious had already taken stock and decided that the scene was intolerable: three cloaked strangers standing over a mangled corpse and a weeping man.

A voice: " Dumbledore has become too meddlesome for his own good of late; intervening at the ministry, harboring all sorts of scum. Like yourself. Thought we'd make an example of you. Thought we'd put your ilk back in its place."

A response: "Who are...please, we haven't done anything."

"Well, its really more the fact that you _exist_ , if you know what I mean." the voice intoned mockingly, " We're not going to kill you, Granger; we just want you to understand, to really feel that understanding. _Crucio_."

In a moment, the thought that it wasn't so terrible flashed through her mind. But it was pushed out by a wave of pain, like an electric shock. Her awareness narrowed to the blinding white before her eyes, and she wished she could pass into it. Thoughts slipped through her figurative fingers like flour; she could not remember herself, couldn't remember her name. Suddenly, the light flickered, and the room swam before her. She had hoped that she would go into shock, but the acute awareness of pain did not leave her.

Thick and warm, blood spattered across her face. They had cut her father's arms off with a Slicing Hex. His torso, grotesque and ruddy, flailed helplessly in the air above her head. His screams were inhuman; they reminded her of the dying peal of a spotted horse her grandfather had shot after it broke its hind leg. He had mis-fired into its flank and it had broken free of the ropes, moving frantically forward, a rivulet of brown blood leaving a wide streak on the summer grass.

The body hit the floor with a thud: headless, armless, and distended. She looked beyond it to the corner, seeing her mothers corpse, the skin of the face burned away to reveal gritty bone. She felt herself shifted onto her back. They spoke around her, but the noise came to her as an indistinct polyphony. Her legs felt cold, and she realized that her purple nightdress, a tasteless Christmas present from a great aunt, had been lifted to her waist. The violation stunned her into full awareness. The man had removed his mask as he entered her, and she saw his face twisted into a cruel grimace. She noticed that he had unusually well-grown eyebrows; they were like leeches stretching across his brow to embrace each other in a sanguinous kiss in the middle. He revolted her, and this fact made his violence that much more unbearable. Her face was wet, and she realized that she was crying. He spasmed and leaned over her, and she saw the wooden handle of a wand in a thin pocket in his robe. Instinct overcame panic, and she grasped it tightly. The first spell that occurred to her was _Stupefy_, and she yelled the word as she pushed him off with her knee. He stumbled back,surprised, and turning frigid and pale fell to the floor. She felt a mild euphoria then, but a streak of red light flew past her arm, and Hermione forced herself to take in the others. There were three other Death Eaters standing in her living room, wands raised in a dueling stance, and pointed at her. A woman's voice screamed the killing curse, and she ducked to the floor. The Green Death flew over her head and hit one cloaked figure in the chest, bathing him in a verdant light that wrapped its tiny mouths around his soul when it exited his body. The woman, enraged by her mistake, ran toward Hermione. Time stretched as she watched the angry face, now unmasked, grow as it approached her. Hermione leveled herself; shocks of pain ran through her body and her brain could not shake a persistent nausea. The vulgarity of the woman's face disturbed her, and she wanted to wipe its image out of her vision, to burn it away, like a badly constructed essay. Without thinking she cast _Incendio_, half certain that nothing would happen_._ She was surprised when a blast of heat hit her face as it emanated from the blazing robes of the Death Eater. Hermione petrified her then,so she could not extinguish the fire.

A hex from behind caught her off guard. It burned its way through her dress and embedded itself like a piece of scorching coal into her back. The pain clouded her mind as she turned and stumbled. A desire overwhelmed her entirely; the horror that hid in the backwater of her brain surged forward with a frightening force, her mind felt bloody and she wanted to inflict pain. She screamed the words that they had directed at her just seconds ago:_ Avada Kedavra._ She had never uttered them before, had never seen the curse cast on a human before tonight. Little gratification succeeded the curse. Another wave of blind rage overcame her. Half aware of herself, she lurched towards the fireplace, where a cast iron poker lay innocuous and mundane among the carnage. Grabbing the handle, she turned toward her attacker, who lay Stupefied on the carpet. She hit him once, in the stomach, and felt a rib give way with a disgusted satisfaction. She did it again, pummeling his flank and head. The shock of the assault had awoken him, and he screeched in pain as the iron pierced his side. She stabbed him again and again, insensate and brutal, until blood began to pool beneath him and trickle from the side of his mouth. He whimpered pathetically, and Hermione, unable to bear his weakness, his humanity, raised her weapon once more and plunged it into the side of his neck. He spasmed as he vomited blood, and lay still.

The doorbell rang.

Outside, Mrs. Galbraith, wearing a vaguely worried expression, blew hot air into the space between her mittened hands. She considered herself a cautious woman, a careful woman. Better safe than sorry, she used to say to the late Mr. Galbraith, before he got run over by a taxicab in New York City, a fact she could not help but blame on his own lack of carefulness.

Mrs. Galbraith was particularly weary of juvenile delinquents,whom she believed were largely responsible for the moral degradation that plagued modern day British youth. Two nights ago, she had heard on the radio that a series of robberies had been committed in a town not fifty miles from her own, by a gang of dangerous hooligans, who were armed and still on the loose. Consequently, she had unearthed her husband's old Army pistol from a shoe box in the closet, and slept with it hidden beneath her pillow. When she had heard the shouting next door, she had naturally assumed that the thieving criminals had found new victims in the Grangers, whom she had always considered proper and respectable people. She picked up telephone to call the police as she glanced out of the window, and saw, to her relief, that the

Grangers' family car stood in the driveway, catching the light from the hall window. The other robberies had been committed when the families had been out of the house. Everything was fine then, perhaps someone had fallen down or maybe there was an argument in progress. Mrs. Galbraith could not help but feel a slight pang of disappointment at the anticlimax; unwilling to go back to bed just yet, she put on her house coat and yellow leather gardening boots, and went outside. She would reassure herself that all was well, and perhaps even have a chance to complain to Mrs. Granger about the appalling ineptitude of the police, who had been chasing the house robbers for a fortnight now with very little to show for their efforts. A minute later, Mrs. Galbraith stood in front of the oak and glass door of Number 23, shivering and waiting. She pushed the buzzer a second time.

The noise found Hermione Granger, standing in the middle of her living room, bloodied poker in hand, and in a state of blind panic. She stared at a watercolor over the mantelpiece, a muddy rendition of the Notre Dame painted by her mother twenty years ago when she was a student traveling across continental Europe. Hermione tried, in vain, to grapple with the enormity of what had just happened. She was surrounded by dead bodies, the room looked like a particularly gory homicide scene, and there was someone at the door.


	2. Part II

Disc: Your humble narrator acknowledges that characters and settings discussed here belong to J.K. Rowling, on whose lofty munificence she would impose enough to have free reign in the distortion and manipulation thereof.

Hermione crept through the hallway, leaving red footprints on the linoleum. Photographed people peered out at her: her cousins parasailing in Antigua, her grandparents at the annual inter-village cricket match , and Aunt Mildred at her wedding reception, wearing a light pink bridal gown with giant poofy sleeves. Impossibly, given that they were ordinary muggle pictures, the images seemed to follow her progress with disapproving stares. Hermione backed up against the wall, and pressed her ear to the door; she could hear steady breathing on the other side.

Anxiety burst like hot acid in her stomach. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale- she imagined that Death, the mythic creature of scary stories for little children, was on the other side, breathing in her soul a bit at a time. She would open the door and there It would be: in all Its finery, scythe in skeletal hand. It would hold out its claw, offering her the chance to come willingly, but she would shake her head. And in a fraction of a second, It would have sliced her chest apart, and her physical body would peel away from the lesion like a second skin, and she would stand before It without artifice or cover, and It would bind her arms in a translucent chain and lead her to the Underworld.

Mrs. Galbraith was getting impatient. She lifted her fist and knocked.

The door vibrated with the sound against Hermione's skull. She clutched her head, surprised, but the pain created a window in her mental cell of Fear. She leaped out of it, and landed on the asphalt of Practicality. She looked through the opaque glass, and saw the nosy neighbor, Mrs. Galbraith, wheezing into a ratty handkerchief and from foot to foot. Her options were to leave, or to open the door and invite the woman in, take her coat, and allow her to walk first into the house, discreetly picking up the letter opener on the sideboard and plunging it in between the older woman's ribs, shutting the door with her foot as the woman fell limp in her arms. She could not contemplate the second option; she would have to go out the back.

She tried to remember the murder mystery novels her father loved so much: how was evidence disposed of? She could use magic, but an investigation by the Ministry would surely uncover the traces of her spells. She could set fire to the house; that seemed like the best option. She would never have considered destroying her first home; but the area had succumbed to urban decay and they had had to move into this place, this monument to the most mundane of suburban habits. These thoughts had carried her back to the living room- a mistake. The smell of burnt flesh overwhelmed her senses as she stepped over the charred corpse of Bellatrix Lestrange. She identified another as her husband, and another as Antonin Dolohov; she remembered their pictures from the Daily prophet a year ago. Ron had cut out the mug shots and pasted them to the bulletin board in the common room; for months the photos had sneered at passing Gryffindors, before Neville had set fire to that corner of the room and burnt away their menacing little faces. She did not know the man whom she had beaten to a bloody pulp, and she could not bring herself to look at the two other bodies, lest her tenuous grasp on clarity should slip and she dissolve into hysterics. She realized that she held an unfamiliar wand, the one she had grabbed from one of the attackers. She used it to transfigure her clothes and banish the blood that had caked in her hair. Another spell, and three other wands came into her grasp, including her own, which she had stupidly kept in the drawer of her nightstand. Apparently, Lestrange's wand had been burnt to a crisp.

In the basement, Hermione examined the various gray pipes that stretched along the wall behind the water heater. She knew nothing about it,of course, but she had heard of enough amateur arsonists blowing up buildings like this to assume that it could not be too difficult. Standing in the doorway, she levitated a wrench. She jerked her wrist suddenly, and the instrument threw itself at the pipes with enough speed to puncture the metal. She turned around and ran up the stairs. The fire was on in the living room; presumably the entire structure would go up in flames any minute now. She rushed for the kitchen door-it led to the garden- and realized that she had forgotten something. She saw a draft shift in the air; it was thick and viscous. She grabbed her mother's wallet from the dish in which they'd kept their keys, and made for the exit, numbly registering self-disgust at her unfeeling sensibleness. Flying out the door, she landed face-down on the grass; it smelled like commercial fertilizer. Behind her, a light flared and the house issued a loud groan. She did not stay to watch it-and them- burn.

She was about 70 kilometers outside of London. There, she supposed, she would have a better chance at finding acceptable accommodations than in her small town; there was only one inn , and the landlady knew her by name. And she could not afford to be seen, not until she figured out what she was going to do, what she was going to say. It would be convenient to be presumed dead by her muggle acquaintances,if only to escape suspicion, but at the same time she had to withdraw money from an automated teller machine, which she knew made films of its customers. If she did so, the police would assume that she was the perpetrator, on the run. Perhaps most pressingly, she had an unknown curse embedded in her lower back, myriad aches and a migraine from the Cruciatus, and a persistent stinging in between her legs.

And there was precious little that she could do about it; she could not risk using a healing spell, with any of the wands, because she knew next to nothing about the system the Ministry used to monitor illegal magic. Somehow, it had never occurred to her that she would one day need that information. Since no Aurors had come barreling through her door, welcome as they would have been, she assumed that the Death Eaters had found a way to circumvent the Ministry's policing, either by charming their wands, or by a manipulation of magical energy around her house. In either case, she was hopeful that her own spells would therefore go undiscovered, since she had used one of their wands and performed magic inside.

On the main street, Hermione got on a bus, paying the fare with loose change in the wallet. It wouldn't take her direct, but it was warm inside and she could sit. The driver looked at her oddly, and she wondered whether she had something on her face, before realizing that she must look bloody awful, if the way she felt was any indication. She took a seat at the back and looked out the window, seeing herself superimposed upon a moving background of dark country landscape. Watching the passing of roadside sycamores and lulled by the rhythm of the wheels, Hermione Granger drifted off into a delirious sleep. Slowly, blood oozed out of the wound on her back and fell in silent drops onto the pale leather of the seat.


	3. This Darkened Room

Disc: Your humble narrator acknowledges that characters and settings discussed here belong to J.K. Rowling, on whose lofty munificence she would impose enough to have free reign in the distortion and manipulation thereof.

CH 3. This Darkened Room

"_For example, we spend thousands of Galleons annually to alchemically produce foodstuffs for those magical creatures that can feed only on human flesh:Harpies, Manticores, and Carnivorous Skrewts, among others. Harvesting the flesh of the Unmagicals for this purpose would save time and money, as well as eliminate the need for toxic dumping grounds which pollute..."_

Draco Malfoy shut the book, hearing the pages crack from the force. They were made of dried human skin, which had begun to disintegrate over the decades. It was _The Muggle Menace_, a treatise on the evils of coexistence with non-magicals, authored by his ancestor, Alaric Malfoius, some 80 years ago. Alaric had discovered several inspired uses for muggles. Among them: as a writing medium.

Outside, sunlight saturated the summer air, reflecting off the glossy leaves of the magnolia beneath the library window. It was now late afternoon, and the air had cooled just enough to allow him to leave the house. He would go to the sitting room where his mother kept her collection of antique Austrian porcelain, open the French doors, and step into the warm air, fragrant with the smells of blooming flowers and wet earth. He could almost perceive its scent as he basked in the pleasure of the fantasy. Putting the book on the reading table, where he had picked it up this morning upon having come into the library looking for a distraction from the monotonous stretch of days that comprised the long vacation. The name had caught his attention; he had consequently passed several pleasant hours immersed in the author's ominous ramblings, slipping into half-conceived fantasies of a world free of impediments to his ascendancy.

He walked to the doors, turning the handle with great concentration; all the doorknobs in the house whined when twisted, and he did not want to make his movements thought the halls audible. It was an unspoken rule: when all three of them were home during the daytime, each pretended that he was alone, haunting one room and avoiding the others. His father spent this time in his study, his mother, in the music room. His trek through the second floor passageway, the noise of his footfalls subdued by years of practice, felt like a trespass. Draco had reached the back staircase when a step behind him forced him to turn. His mother stood in the doorway of the dining hall, wearing formal robes and the expression of cold boredom that she saved for the better days.

"I hope, my dear, that you have not been idling all morning?" He shook his head." I'm sure you remember: the Minister and his wife are coming to supper at seven. Now, this is a very important event for your father; you must be on your very best behavior. Speak only when you are spoken to and show Mrs. Fudge every courtesy: your father expects you to reflect the family in the best possible light. And you can wear the emerald dress robes we bought in Marseilles last winter..."

"I know, Mother."

He hadn't, actually. The memory of the Important Dinner had gotten lost somewhere in between aimless summer daydreams and sleepy routines. Now, he remembered his father mentioning it over breakfast a few weeks ago, but his attention had wavered, as usual, and moved onto other diversions; namely, his great-aunt Isabella's youthful portrait that hung above the breakfast room fireplace. Her burgundy dress, risqué for that age, split down the side of the skirt to reveal a pale expanse of leg. Simian eyes smiled out of an otherwise imperious face, mocking the observer's passion. The painting had been the first object to evoke a spasm of desire in him, as he glanced at it with guilty eyes over the top of his tea cup one morning shortly after his ninth birthday. Though it had not lost its fascination over the years, he looked at it now with a fond nostalgia, instead of a shamefaced lust.

His mother turned, and retreated into preparations that he couldn't be bothered to wonder at. He would not have time now to venture outdoors, he realized with a pang of resentment. Control; that is what he lacked. He felt as if his life was governed in every little detail, in every word and thought and gesture.

Turing he headed for his rooms; those hideous green robes needed finding.

* * *

The candlelight reflected gently off three blond heads as the Malfoys, poised and motionless, stood in the parlor two hours later. The silence was overwhelming; not so much as an eyebrow twitched. Lucius, Narcissa, and Draco were lined up like Russian dolls, each a slightly different, and slightly smaller, version of the last. Even the house elves crept about quiet and invisible.

Draco was fighting back the urge to sneeze. Particles of minuscule lint drifted off his dress robes, which had not seen the light of day in many months, hanging like a cumulus about his head, so, he tried to focus his concentration on the motion of the golden hands of the grandfather clock across the room, but it wasn't working. The persistent tickling in his nose would allow him no peace.

The sound of his unsuppressed sneeze echoed through the hall, forcing Narcissa to break her immaculate poise to glare at her son. For a moment, he thought that she was going to say something, perhaps reprimand him for being rude and send him to his room, but she just gave him an icy look and turned away. Now the silence was heavy with an unspoken blame; fortunately, the sound of wheels on the gravel outside prevented Draco from incriminating himself further by uttering an apology.

The Minister and his wife arrived fashionably late in a gilded equipage pulled by two silver-haired winged horses. Draco watched Fudge alight from the carriage, and turn to grasp a thick-fingered hand with pointed nails that reached blindly out of the darkened interior. A dainty foot encased in a heeled slipper appeared on the step; and then, the body attached to that foot emerged. It was a body of impressive mass but seemingly all softness and no bone.

Mrs. Fudge was a whole head and a half taller than her husband, and several Ministers wide. Despite this, Draco thought that she bore an uncanny resemblance to a china doll. Her complexion was plaster white and her vapid blue eyes bulged out of her face, moving about in a twitchy and suspicious roll. She had a snobbish upturned nose and a small petulant mouth. Her coiffure was tucked into a tiny round hat atop her head and her fuchsia gown left much too little to the imagination-a fact for which Draco was sincerely sorry.

"My dear Cornelius, what a pleasure to have you here again. It has been far too long since you have graced us with your presence," quoth Lucius, with a voice seemingly devoid of affectation.

"Indeed it has, my friend, indeed it has. Allow me to introduce to you the apple of my eye, my darling Wilhelmina."

"You can call me Minnie; everyone does."

"Enchanted, Madame." Minnie giggled girlishly as Lucius Malfoy kissed her hand.

"My wife, Narcissa, and our son, Draco." Lucius motioned to his family as Narcissa gave a gracious smile and Draco an artificial one, " Draco, please show Mrs. Fudge-excuse me- _Minnie _inside."

Draco gave a formal bow and offered the woman his arm, an action he regretted almost immediately since her grip was on the injurious side of firm. Hiding a grimace of pain for the sake of decorum, he led the Mrs. Fudge through hallways that, for the first time, seemed interminable, pointing out the portraits of the more eccentric of his forebears. Behind them, Narcissa issued an inaudible- but vehement- sigh of disgust; she had an appropriate loathing for the nouveau riche and other uppity types with little sense and even less taste.

Dinner was an awkward affair, thought Draco; full of stifled conversation, painfully obvious comments about the dining room décor, and the unnaturally amplified sounds of clinking china. He found petty amusement, however, in watching the Minister and his wife trade restrained comments across the table. At one point, when Fudge reached for a plate of roasted duck with his fork, Minnie gave his hand a sharp slap.

"Cornelius, how many times do I have to tell you? If you don't start eating better, you'll leave me a widow before I turn 70. Is that what you want?" she said in a tone that held the weariness of many years of rehashing the same argument.

"No, dear, " her husband replied, in an reconciliatory and vaguely apologetic voice.

Seemingly satisfied, she proceeded to help herself to a generous slice of the duck, while her husband scooped droopy haricots verts onto his plate.

Dinner dialogue consisted primarily of Minnie regaling the Malfoys with stories of her domestic tribulations (devoting a goodly amount of time to the enumeration of the incompetencies of her house elves). Narcissa listened with apparently rapt attention as Draco attempted to catch her eye so that she could pass him the dish of cassoulet sitting just beyond his grasp on the table. Unreasonably, he felt that his mother was neglecting him in the most despicable manner.

In what he would later describe as a fit of perversity, he turned to Mrs Fudge and said:

"Excuse me, Madam, but it is hardly uncommon for someone like yourself to have trouble with elf-management. I mean, elves were traditionally bound only to Pureblood families of the highest distinction; perhaps yours are having trouble adjusting?"

Narcissa nearly dropped her fork.

"Mrs. Fudge, I beg you to forgive my son for that tasteless remark; he is clearly suffering the effects of a full day of studies and from having drank perhaps a little too much of the wine." She followed this pronouncement, made in a vacuum of absolute silence, with a tinny laugh.

With an edge of desperation to her voice, she turned to Fudge and asked: "Please, tell me something about your work, Minister. I've always been so terribly interested in political and international affairs, but am much too busy with my family to indulge myself in the perusal of the subject."

Raising his voice to an appropriate pitch of pomposity, Fudge began a soliloquy:

"I am so glad you asked, Narcissa. Let me tell you, its been downright hellish these last ten months. You don't know how happy I am that this foolish business with You Know Who has finally been laid to rest, despite all the efforts of that awful man, Dumbledore, to stir up every decent witch and wizard into a full blown revolt against the Ministry."

Unfortunately, the business with You Know Who had not been laid to rest at all. In fact, since his encounter with the Forces of Good at the Department of Mysteries, an event to which he had henceforth referred to as 'The Fiasco', Voldemort had escalated the offensive, which would have been obvious to anybody who had been paying even a modicum of attention to headlines over the past year. The Minister, however, was not just anybody. Following the break-in at the Ministry, Fudge had gone on record as blaming the chaos wreaked on the infrastructure on deranged killer Sirius Black who, apparently foiled by his own wicked plans, met an unglamorous end when he tripped and fell into the Arch of Doom. Luckily, the public was sufficiently inured to the absurdity of Ministry explanations for this claim to go uncontested in any but the most obscure publications.

Pervasive corruption in the Wizarding media and common prejudice ensured that most of the magical population of Britain was ignorant of the highly suspicious events that took place in the Muggle world that summer. A series of calamitous bombings had affected all parts of the country; everything from subway systems to commercial centers had been targeted and the casualty list was extensive. The Muggle P.M. was convinced that a terrorist group thought to have gone underground was in resurgence. Little did he know that these were the deeds of one malevolent Dark Lord in a cleverly-orchestrated gambit to force his nemesis, Harry Potter, out of the safety of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and into a direct confrontation. To the immense frustration of said Dark Lord, the plot was not working. Harry Potter, while aware that he was the only person capable of defeating Voldemort, did not know that all the mayhem on the nightly news was for his benefit. The missives and messengers dispatched by Voldemort to alert Harry Potter of this circumstance had been unceremoniously intercepted by members of the Order of the Phoenix stationed in the vicinity of Little Whinging for precisely this purpose. Vexed but undaunted, the Dark Lord, assuming that Harry Potter was not as conscientious as his house affiliation would imply, decided that a more compelling incentive was needed. Accordingly, he had arranged for the murder of the Grangers and the kidnapping of their daughter and Harry's best friend, Hermione, for whose benefit, Voldemort was certain, Harry Potter would risk his own life.

But Voldemort was no stranger to frustration. In fact, from a certain perspective, his life could appear to be a series of spectacularly dramatic failures intercepted with periods whose only function was to prop him up for even more dramatic failures. Now, he found himself wishing daily that things would for once-_for once-_ go his way. But the fates had conspired against him; his supporters were few, the public was weary, and his attempts to assassinate one measly teenage boy were repeatedly thwarted. Worst of all, his borrowed body had begun to disintegrate and his magic was weakening, forcing him to resort to using the Dark Mark to covertly steal power from his acolytes. The Death Eaters, devitalized but over-confident, were taking out their frustration over what they believed were their individual failings out on their Muggle victims. Their blundering had insured that they were constantly on the receiving end of Voldemort's blunt wrath. Lucius Malfoy, fed up with the gratuitous Crucios and the relentless stress, was planning a mutiny. To this end, he had invited the Minister to dinner and was intending to tell him that the still unsupressed rumors were true; 'You Know Who' had indeed returned. He hoped to convince Fudge that he was willing to spy on Voldemort on behalf of the Ministry, ferret out whatever useful information there was to be found and deliver it post-haste into government hands.

After dinner, when the two men sat in the study with a bottle of scotch between them, Lucius gathered the fortitude to begin his tale.

"Cornelius, I am afraid I have some truly horrid news. I did not want to say anything in front of the family, but I feel that you really must know."

"My dear man, what _is_ the matter? You are making me quite frightened."

"About two days ago, I had an unexpected visit from someone I have had no contact with in many years. My wife's unfortunate and confused sister, Bellatrix Lestrange, showed up on our doorstep, quite out of her wits. I believe she thought that she was trying to recruit us to join He Who Must Not Be Named. She said that it was he who had enabled her escape from Azkaban. I was convinced that she had gone completely mad, until she stuck her Dark Mark right in front of our noses, and, to my horror, I saw that it was pitch black and obvious as day." Lucius felt faintly guilty about maligning his wife's favorite sister in such a manner, but was sure that Bellatrix, with whom they had spent a pleasant Sunday brunch just last week, would understand.

He continued: " I'm sure you remember, Cornelius, that they only get like that when _He _has been tampering with them."

" What.. how..." the Minister was at a loss for words. "Are you certain?"

Lucius gave a grave nod, secretly exultant over Fudge's gullibility.

"I am afraid so. I saw it with my own eyes. I regret that Bellatrix had run off before I could convince her to accompany me to the Ministry; apparently she has more wits about her than we suspected. If it is as I fear, and He has indeed returned, my family is certain to be targeted. As you are aware, no doubt, I have never had anything to do with You Know Who, but my ancestry is sure to recommend me to Him as a potential follower. I couldn't stand it if my failure to act preemptively somehow endangered my wife and son." He finished in a plaintive tone, lightly infused with a bit of desperation.

Fudge, unaware of Lucius' subtle manipulation, had a Brilliant Idea-a rare occurrence for the poor Minister.

"Take heart, Malfoy; there may be something you can do to help not only yourself, but also the rest of the Wizarding World. If, let us say, you were to be approached by one of those Death Eaters, you could allow them to persuade you to join the cause. Become a spy, like. You would be able to put invaluable information into the hands of our Aurors and potentially rescue us all from the greatest threat to our society since the days of Grindelwald. And you have such a brave and generous nature, Lucius, always giving so much of yourself to others..." Fudge, in awe of his own cleverness, felt that he had backed the other man into a corner. Dare he refuse and show himself a coward?

"If you think it the best way, Minister; I would certainly be honored to do anything within my power to help."

"Excellent, excellent. Thank-you, on behalf of wizard-kind. I can contact you tomorrow by floo to discuss details, yes? Only, my wife is fatigued so easily and I rather think she's had enough excitement for one evening."

They shook hands, and the smile of each was rather more pronounced than the seriousness of the situation merited.

Ten minutes later, Minnie and the Minister made a graceful exit, exchanging pleasantries with the hostess in tones that left no doubt as to their mutual feelings. In the carriage, while his wife denigrated everything in the Malfoy home from the curtains to the dessert in a ceaseless monologue, Fudge gloated over his cunning and his circumspection. After all, he had persuaded Malfoy to spy on He Who Must Not Be Named without promising him a single knut and had found a solution to a most dire issue. For he had known about the Dark Lord's return for months, but had seen no way of taking action without alerting the public and making his administration look unresponsive and uninformed. Now, he could comfort himself with the knowledge that he was doing something- without actually having to do something.

Back at the manor, Lucius gloated over his cunning and his circumspection. For once, he had manipulated Fudge into doing what he wanted without having to make a ridiculously large 'donation'. Now he could wait for the Dark Lord to make himself vulnerable, giving the Ministry the alert at the appropriate moment so that its forces would have to do all of the dirty work in the final battle. He would arrive just in time to cast the curse that would kill Voldemort, thus freeing himself from bondage and appearing to have saved the wizarding world. He would then proceed to use his status as hero to catapult himself into the Minister's job- it was his fondest childhood ambition.

* * *

Meanwhile, Draco trailed behind his mother like a penitent. He knew what was coming; she had always brought him to the house elves' domain to scold him, as though it were the only room in the house lowly enough to witness such disgraceful displays. She preceded him through the heavy oak door, turned to shut it, and cast _Silencio_, although there was no one else in the house except his father.

She made a visible attempt to keep her voice steady, but it came out forced and too loud: "Didn't I ask you to be on you best behavior, to give Mrs. Fudge every courtesy?" She echoed her words from that afternoon.

He assumed that these were rhetorical questions. Assumed incorrectly.

"Answer me when I ask you a question!" It was almost a yell.

"Yes, ma'am". Though the affirmation was a near-whisper, it reverberated through the room.

"Correct. And what do you do? Insult our guest to her face, and the Minister's wife, no less! After everything your father has worked so hard to accomplish at the Ministry, you give in to the last immature, selfish, unthinking impulse, shattering Merlin knows how many years of overtures in a second of childish stupidity."

"But Mother, she really was asking for it..."

"No, young man, your impertinence has gone quite far enough. Do not presume to make excuses for yourself. I want you to go up to your room immediately and write a letter of apology to Mrs. Fudge, and you had better hope that she deigns to forgive you."

"And what am I supposed to say? 'Sorry you're such a fat annoying hag; I couldn't help myself'?"

"I don't care if you blame Albus Dumbledore or food poisoning, just make it believable." She paused for air. "What are you waiting for? Go!" One pale, imperious finger dismissed him.

He went, but not quickly enough to prevent her from saying:

"And if you think that after that little demonstration I'll allow you to go to Mykonos with the Parkinsons, you are sorely mistaken."

Oh, how he hated her then. He had been looking forward to the trip to Greece all spring. Daydreams of white beaches and blue waters, a place to unearth his latent poetic genius, the sun-tanned arms of rustic village women, glistening from the strain of carrying baskets of vegetables to market; all these things escaped him. He had been willing to put up with a month of listening to Pansy's noxious prattle for the opportunity to travel to Greece, the motherland of the playwrights and philosophers he idolized, and locale of great natural beauty. For these were Draco's favorite things: the complexities of Hellenistic wizard thinkers and the simpler, but no less sweet, beauties of the natural world.

He entered his rooms- he had the entire fourth floor to himself- and slammed the door, knowing that hi mother would hear it all the way down in the basement.

Now, he would have to spend the next three months skulking around the house, avoiding his parents, wasting away in the gloom of the library like a decaying corpse, relying on the caprices of English summer weather for his pleasures. He could hardly bear the thought, could hardly hold back the tears pooling in the corners of his eyes.

A desire overwhelmed him entirely; he walked over to his leather valise, packed and sitting on the bed, and opened the lid. Violently, he extracted jackets and underwear and notebooks, throwing these items with barbarous force against the walls, the bureau, the Japanese silk screens that populated his private realm. He toiled until his arsenal of projectiles had been depleted.

Another wave of blind rage overcame him. Half aware of himself, he lurched towards the writing desk, where a envelope knife lay among the debris. Grabbing the handle, he turned toward his gutted suitcase, which lay empty and upturned on the velvet coverlet, as if it were the carcass of an addax stripped bare by a pack of ravenous vultures under the scorching desert sun. He stabbed it once and felt the cardboard give way with a disgusted satisfaction. He did it again, spearing its two halves mercilessly. Insensate and brutal, he thrust the blade until the satchel was riddled with holes. But it wasn't enough. He wanted to do something so preposterous that it would send his mother into a fit of tears. And he knew just the thing.


	4. Salon Morbide

Disclaimer: id.

Summarized at end.

CH 4. Salon Morbide

_Earlier that evening..._

"I'm telling you, there won't be anybody there!"

"And I'm telling _you_, of course there will, you idiot."

In the intervening silence, you could have heard a Biting Fairy sigh.

"What did you call me, Dolohov?"

"You heard me."

"I don't believe I did, because it _sounded_ as if you were insulting me, but that would be impossible."

"D'you really think they'd just leave Potter's Mudblood in an unprotected house, a sitting target?"

"And I suppose that being a Half-Blood makes you more qualified than the rest of us to extrapolate on the what-passes-for-logical processes of the blood traitors?"

Dolohov's anemic face undertook a feral aspect as he lunged forward; his advantage in height and mass made the struggle which ended with Lestrange pinned to a bookshelf by the scuff of his robes brief.

"Do _not_ provoke me, Lestrange," Dolohov snarled, projecting globules of spit onto the other's disgusted face. "You know perfectly well that I could kick your scrawny arse in a duel."

Fighting the urge to reach for his handkerchief, Rodolphus reached for his wand instead.

For better or for worse, the impending duel was interrupted by the entrance of Bellatrix Lestrange, who barreled into the room at a remarkable speed, wand clutched in her fist. These days, her wand never left her fingers: she held it in one hand, and a fork in the other, at dinner; she clutched it in her sleep; she took it into the bath.

"Kindly unhand my husband, Antonin," she said, and when he failed to respond, she cast.

A blast of blue light cut between the struggling figures, wrenching Dolohov away from his adversary and projecting him ceiling-ward. He landed near the bookshelves on the opposite wall, groaning when he collided with a heavy reading table.

It took Dolohov considerable effort to prevent himself from lashing out, as he would have done with anyone else, but experience dictated that in one of her "moods", Madam Lestrange behaved very much as a rabid animal, unpredictable and dangerous, best left well alone. If only alone could mean a bloody padded cell, he'd be a happy man.

So, he simply watched her with weary eyes as he levered himself off the ground, nursing little in the way of damage except a bruised ego.

Parts of hair stuck out at strange angles from what had no doubt been meant as an attempt at an up-do, and the dress robes she wore, ancient black lace patched in spots with dust and white filaments of spider silk, though hardly an improvement from her usual ilk, indicated that an effort had been made for an event of some importance.

She walked across the room in which they congregated daily to plan the Mudblood Operation, (the lower library of the Riddle House, assimilated for the purpose), the shredded hem of her dress clearing lines on the dusty floorboards.

"While you two have been quibbling like infants, I've just come from the Dark Lord's private chambers." She said the words 'private chambers' in a breathy tone, and while she and Pettigrew were the only two favored with the privilege of entrance, as the most trusted, the invitation was precious to Bella for an altogether different reason. He, Lord Voldemort, was always the epitome of decorum, but hope sprang eternal in a breast otherwise withered of sentiment.

Muttering indecipherables to herself, Bellatrix rifled through the maps and parchments on the bureau as the men deliberated whether on not an interruption would provoke attack.

Summoning courage, her husband began: "What did -"

Only to be cut short by: "What in damnation are you waiting for? I expect you ready in an hour."

Bewildered, Dolohov inquired: "For what?"

She pinned him with a glare.

"Oh, you useless creature. The Dark Lord plans for us to attack the Mudblood tonight!" She turned to rifling through a casket which held an assortment of spindly magical instruments, intently studying and then discarding each.

"Mad as a loon," Dolohov said, too quietly to be overheard by either Bellatrix or her spouse, who stood behind her, catching the gadgets as she tossed them over her shoulder, responding with crooning reassurances to her agitated murmurs.

Dolohov felt the beginnings of a migraine coming on; he eyed the liquor cabinet speculatively, decided that alcohol wouldn't make the situation any less insufferable, and continued the train of conversation that had been interrupted by the woman's entrance.

"What about the Aurors?"

"There will be none," Rodolphus snapped."Will there, darling?"

He turned to his wife, who was preoccupied with a pair of thumbscrews rusted into ineffectiveness. With a whispered spell, the implement morphed into a long-legged spider, shiny and black. She seemed pleased with the transformation, and with a small smirk, squished the insect between her fingers.

"Those were my favorites, years ago. And no one bothered to use a rust-repelling charm. Typical, really." She sighed. "Call him immediately, and inquire into the issue. Although I am of the opinion that anyone they may have watching those _animals_ will be simplicity itself to eliminate."

"Call whom, the Dark Lord?"

"Ah, you would disturb him over this? Does the Dark Lord benefit from such a servant? You must aspire to be worthy, boy," and he, only ten years her junior, the wretched hag. "Severus Snape. Who else? That treacherous, shifty little thing...summon him!"

"Certainly, your Ladyship," Dolohov muttered as he walked toward the fireplace.

The words pierced through Bella's fragile facade of calm, her concentration. _Your Ladyship_...could they know, these unexceptionals, the fondest, most closely cherished secret of her heart? Impossible!

"I _beg _your pardon?" It was an acid whisper, leaving no room for doubt that it was unquestionably _he_ who should be begging_ her _pardon on bended knee.

Dolohov stopped short. He had not counted on her being quite so lucid this evening; typically, the preoccupations of madness left her insensible of her surroundings, but tonight, her seeming distraction was deceptive. Since their escape from Azkaban, Bellatrix was more vicious, more resourceful, and, apparently, more powerful then before The Fall. And utterly, utterly unhinged.

"I said nothing."

But she had seen the flicker of fear in his mind. Also, she had seen disgust, and it enraged her.

"How _dare_ you mock your superiors, Half-Blood scum? I'll take your vile tongue right out!" The tip of her raised wand glowed red.

"Bella, dear, really..." Rodolphus made a half-hearted attempt at intervention, though he was not specifically averse to the prospect of a tongueless Dolohov.

Dolohov moved with the reflexes born out of a lifetime of criminality, both petty and dreadful, throwing powder into the hearth and leaping into the flames just in time to avoid a curse that shattered the mantle above the fireplace into a coarse dust.

A year ago, Death Eater agents within the Floo Network Authority had mounted a covert operation to remove the fireplaces of Voldemort's supporters from the general Floo and connect them via a secret, insular network, inaccessible to anyone who did not bear the Dark Mark. Since no more than three dozen fireplaces consolidated within the web, Dolohov's journey to Spinner's End was over in seconds.

The room which greeted him upon arrival appeared uninhabited. The floors were grimy with many years of neglect, spiderwebs glistened in shadowy corners, and a solitary light bulb glared upon furniture covered with sheets yellow from age. The desolate, dilapidated surroundings unpleasantly reminded Dolohov of his youth, spent living by his wits, flitting between the cruel, gray cities of the Continent. But...somewhere in the depths of the gloom, he heard the noises of life and decided that the house, dark and cave-like, suited its inhabitants well: a rodent and a bat, afraid lest their ugly forms see the light of day. Probably buggering each other silly, Dolohov thought with disgust. There had always been this soiled, smarmy air around Wormtail, and a blind man could see that Snape pranced around as if he had a broom shoved up his arse and liked it.

Downstairs, the basement, unlike the rest of the place, bore signs of use: scattered books and quills, unfinished meals uncleared and left to rot, towels, clothes, thrown on the floor, and the cloying smell of sweat.

Out of the chemical haze that shrouded one corner of the room, emerged the Potions Master; behind him, Dolohov perceived the outlines of a workbench, cabinets, and several cauldrons.

"Ah. I was wondering who that could be," Snape drawled. It was a lie, and both knew it; Snape warded his worthless hovel as though it were a veritable palace. How it must chafe to have so little and be constantly confronted with the likes of Malfoy, who probably used gold plated paper to wipe his poncy behind. But Dolohov knew all about that, of course. That was why they hated each other, really, him and Snape; they were too much alike. Not that he'd admit it under torture, mind you.

Projecting his voice so that it carried through the wide space, Snape called, "Your presence is required, Pettigrew."

A wand in one hand, and a lowball in the other, he approached a round table in the center of the basement. Gesticulating at the books, the stacks of notes, the bottles that littered the surface, he said: "I hope you will forgive the mess, but the again, I'm sure _you _won't mind. The help has been remiss in his housekeeping duties, but what can one expect form a creature which has such a limited understanding of personal hygiene? Won't you sit down?" The last, with poisonous mockery.

He fell heavily into a chair, but Dolohov remained standing, narrowing his eyes at his...host, for lack of a better word. He could never pin Snape down, could not figure out if all his ironic sarcasm was meant to get under his skin or if the man had just been born a wretched blighter and couldn't help it. Hadn't _said _anything rude, it was just that _tone_...Dolohov decided to volley back.

"Drinking on the job, Snape?"

Snape snorted into the very drink in question, considered chucking the glass in the general direction of Dolohov's forehead, but was unable to gather enough enthusiasm to actually lift his arm, oddly heavy as it seemed to be. Funny enough, he couldn't actually remember a time when he had _not _been drinking on the job. The job practically demanded it, whether one meant the spying or the crowd control and damage mitigation lovingly referred to as 'teaching' by the ignorant and the malicious. Whether one meant life, and wasn't that reason enough? The very fact of his existence made Snape want to drown in all his fucking father's liquor. Inebriation always did make him unnaturally sentimental, he thought with disgust.

And, more to the point, who the hell was Dolohov to cast aspersions when they all knew about his little _issue_ with Muggle narcotics?

"I'd offer you a glass, Antonin, but this is a rather rare draft, and it would be a shame to waste it. Besides, this isn't really your poison, is it? You were always one for mindless, cheap gratification, no matter how far down the gutter you had to burrow to get it."

"Speaking of burrowing down the gutter, d'you ever manage to ram it up that Mudblood of yours? You-." The rest was drowned in violet light as Dolohov hurtled against a wall for the second time that evening. And Merlin, if it wasn't his sodding luck to hit the _exact_ same painful spot on his hip.

"_Crucio_."

Blindsided, Dolohov began to choke on his tongue, emitting gurgling noises, trying not to bite through his lips. A trail of saliva dribbled down his chin and fell to the floor.

Snape held the curse for a lot longer than Dolohov had expected he would. Finally, the pain receded. Dolhov wiped his mouth with the back of one trembling hand.

"How DARE you even think, let alone _speak _of her, you worthless excuse...." Dolohov struggled to tune him out, but Snape was advancing, demented rage rolling off him in waves, eddying, and lapping at Dolohov's ankles like a sewage overspill. He had figured, all things considered, that either Lestrange or Snape would be the death of him, and now spared a tiny moment of regret that it wouldn't be her to do him in, after all. Nimue knew she was easier on the eyes, and he'd carried quite the torch for her in his time.

Snape was sputtering and incoherent, seemingly torn between dismembering him right then and dragging it out. Out of nowhere, Dolohov realized that he didn't give a damn either way, and that unsettled him a little. He would die right there in a filthy Muggle basement and couldn't bring himself to care less. In a way, it was a relief. Self-preservation was just so _exhausting, _and if there had ever been a purpose to all this, he had long ago lost sight of it. But Dolohov was almost glad that Pettigrew entered just then.

Almost.

Snape shut down so fast it was frankly scary. In the blink of an eye, he went from murderous to calmly disdainful, eying Wormtail like a bit of grime on the side of his workboot.

"You wanted me?" he asked Snape.

"Certainly not, Wormtail. I simply enjoy watching you scramble to attention like a house elf."

Snape turned an impassive face to Dolohov, who had managed to pick himself up.

"My business is with the _Professor_, Wormtail," Dolohov's intonation was ironic, "so you can run along."

Wormtail, the Death Eater of lowest rank, who also happened to be the only Death Eater skilled enough to accomplish full animagus transformation, made a show of noting the time and the visitor's identity in a small notebook.

"Ah, yes, the memory_ is_ the first to go with age, is it not?" Snape drawled, enjoying Wormtail's ineloquent anger.

"We were in the same year, you git!"

"But_ I_ did not spent a decade in a Weasley's pocket. Clearly the experience has addled whatever brains you claimed to possess before the fact. The stench of _blood traitor_ never does go away, does it?"

_You would know, _Pettigrew thought. But he prevented himself from voicing the remark. It would not do to provoke Snape now, while his plans were so tentative. But he was certain the time would come when he would worm his away out from under the boots of these glorified thugs.

Transforming back into his animagus form, Wormtail scurried into the darkness.

"Is he gone then?"

"A talent for eavesdropping is just one of the many _fine_ skills Wormtail has to offer our Master."

All in all, Snape thought, that was a rather good barb with the minor exception that the majority of his own usefulness to the Dark Lord comprised largely the same thing.

"Can't you get rid of him?"

"As dearly as I would love to, I suspect it was not the Dark Lord's intention in..._loaning_ me Wormtail to have me kill him."

"Ah yes, I'd forgotten that he's here to make sure you toe the line. Tell me, does he follow you into the loo? Warm your bed at night?"

Snape sneered.

"As charming as this undoubtedly is- for you- don't tell me you're here to make scintillating conversation, Dolohov."

"Oh, never that. _She_ wants to speak to you."

"Well, you can tell her to go to hell. I'm busy."

"I'm afraid that she was quite insistent." Dolohov rubbed the ache in his hip, where her spell had blasted him into a table earlier."I don't think you want her to come here and get you herself."

Snape considered. He could refuse altogether, only to have that lunatic barge into his laboratory, wreaking unknown damage on his workspace, and possibly, his person. Or, he could obey the summons, leaving his potion at a most critical point in the process. Most likely, he would have to re-do the batch. Oh, how he wished the Dementors had sucked Bellatrix dry of whatever corroded essence still animated her nefarious person. _Damn and blast!_

He wanted to know what they were up to. He suspected that, for the past two weeks, the others had been hatching some sort of plan that was studiously being kept hidden from him.

Thus, as Wormtail peered on the scene with tiny eyes from underneath the sofa, Snape rose and followed Dolohov up the narrow staircase.

Although he would have rather pulled his fingernails out than admit it, visiting Spinner's End never failed to profoundly unnerve Dolohov, perhaps because it never failed to remind him of an Azkaban cell. The air, always still and cold enough to see exhaled breath, the utter silence, the smell of dirt and germinating moss, the atmosphere completely drained of color and feeling, all these things were the same. And Snape, his own Dementor, so much a part of the house that death had stained, that Dolohov could fancy him a ghost, prisoner of some gruesome history.

He reached for the tin on the fireplace, but it was empty.

"You're out of powder."

"Am I?" Snape lifted the sheet of a cupboard, and searched inside. "How _fortunate_ that I keep a reserve. Otherwise, I would have had to refuse your invitation."

Dolohov glanced at the mirror above the mantle; its cracked surface reflected the room in shards, fragmentary and surreal.

"You know, it's bad luck to keep a broken mirror."

"Perhaps."

Snape returned with a cup brimful of ash-grey powder. Studying their distorted reflections, he continued: "But the dead are very particular."

Since Dolohov was second to step into the flames, he did not witness the beginning of the scuffle that ensued as soon as Snape arrived at the Riddle House. Bellatrix had taken advantage of the momentary disorientation that succeeds floo travel and, a long stiletto in hand, had leaped upon the Potions Master from behind and stabbed the blade into his shoulder.

Snape realized that the knife was seeped in a Veritaserum derivative when he felt the numbing effects of the potion permeate his system. He blasted the creature off him, but it was too late; the potion was created for instantaneous dissolution upon entry to the bloodstream. He had designed it himself.

Lestrange maneuvered his suddenly clumsy form into an armchair, digging her nails into his shoulders as she sat him upright. From the smirk on her face, he knew she intended to leave marks. With all the languorous grace her breeding afforded, Bellatrix leaned forward with her her hands on the armrests of his chair as she watched his symptoms. The pupils were dilated in her black eyes, which stared unblinking into his own, waiting for a mirror dilation. He noticed that one eye looked flat and dead, while the other glinted with moisture and was utterly mad.

And, despite his best intentions, Snape felt a tendril of fear knot in his gut... he looked away.

Bellatrix smirked and fingered a lock of his hair, scraping one pale fingernail against his neck as she tucked it behind his ear.

"Miss me, _Severus_?" She purred low enough that none but him could hear it.

_Oh gods._

She hadn't been this way in years, and he had managed to banish the memory of that drugging tone from waking thought.

He breathed- long, hard- through his nose, and pretended he hadn't heard.

"Am I to surmise from that little demonstration that the Dark Lord has doubts regarding my information?" Snape asked, giving every impression of being utterly unaffected and totally unconcerned, even as he felt himself sinking into a deeper gradient of distortion. Although he had been purposely building a tolerance for the truth serum since Voldemort's return, this dose was very high, nearly toxic. He could resist the compulsion with Occlumency, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to concentrate on anything. He shifted his head away from the suddenly blinding light of a table lamp...and there was the smell. _Sulphur. _So faint that he could not say whether it was there in actuality, or just a specter of his fear. He raised his hand across his mouth and breathed the pleasant smell of ethanol which lingered on his fingers...and the sulphurous stench was gone!

No...he caught another passing current, which irritated the filmy lining of his mouth, itched at the back of his throat ...

Why did it torment him?

Bellatrix looked momentarily worried, and Snape knew that she had not asked their Master's permission.

However, given Voldemort's inexplicable fondness for the twisted hag, it was likely that she wouldn't even be punished for it.

Snape had been spared the dubious pleasure of making Bella's acquaintance until the tender age of seven, at a pureblood banquet, the invitation to which had been the culmination of his mother's lengthy and humiliating campaign to re-insinuate herself into the good graces of her estranged family.

Like any Slytherin worth her salt, Eileen Prince had been a proud woman who knew that the ends occasionally required some groveling and begging. If only she had used that same prudent logic when it came to his father, and put him in his place with a well-appointed "Avada Kedavra" before they'd ever spoken their vows, things would have been much better. But then he would never have been been born. And that, Snape decided, would have be no great loss to anybody.

That night, their specious and condescending pleasantries had left a bitter taste in the young boy's mouth. If experience had not sensitized him to conversation full of veiled contempt, all of it would have gone right over his head. "_So very_ glad _he turned out well... so much like your father, Eileen, it's a relief...he'll be safe at Hogwarts before you know it...a child needs to be around appropriate role-models..."_

All the while, his mother bobbing her head as if her cranium had disattached from her spine.

"Just a precaution, Severus, I'm sure you would have done the same."

"Mmm, but I would have used twice the dose, and put the rest of us out of our misery."

Rodolphus Lestrange emitted a snort from his perch in the corner. Letting Bella do the dirty work, as usual.

"Why, Severus, you're so much more pleasant when you're being sincere."

_Feeling clean for the first time he could remember, little Severus had hovered around his mother's skirts all evening, assessed and found just barely acceptable by every pair of haughty eyes that slid across his washed but undernourished face, his spotless but threadbare robes. When they'd tired of him, he had been dismissed to the children's table, which was rather like being thrown from the frying pan into the fire, since pureblood youth within that circle had all of the bigoted arrogance of their parents and none of their restraint. Bellatrix presided over the kiddie corner, and, having just turned 17, was the eldest of the bunch. Seething with resentment after being relegated to babysitting when she'd finally earned her place with the adults, Bella had not made a favorable impression on little Severus. He'd found her egotistical, spoiled, and uninspired. _

Bella, in her turn, had given Snape a disdainful once-over and found him stuttering, servile, and not nearly interesting enough to be much fun to taunt. He was, and always had been, an ugly, misbegotten little worm who was too smart for his own good.

The first demand assaulted his fraying senses:

"Tell me about the security measures that the Order uses to protect its members. Residences, specifically." She circled him like a carrion bird, pausing just behind his chair, out of sight. She could snap his neck if she chose to. And- the thought came unbidden, revolting him utterly- there was once a time when that had turned him on.

A synthetic desire to obey and speak was repressed with more difficulty than he showed.

"I believe the subject was well rehashed at Tuesday's meeting, or perhaps you've forgotten? I have read that dementia can have that effect on occasion."

Bellatrix studied him suspiciously.

"All, as I recall, based solely on your information. Of which you did not have much."

"What makes you think that they have changed their minds about what I am allowed to know?"

"Allowed to know, or choose to know, when it suits you to know it? The Dark Lord, he is merciful. He took you back into the fold although you abandoned him in his hour of need. Managed to convince him that you are necessary to the cause, when he would have killed you. He tolerates you, he gives you much license. But me, I doubt! Yes, I doubt your more than amiable relations with Dumbledore's teachers, with the Mudblood vermin that fester in the halls of Hogwarts."

"I don't think that I've ever been accused of being amiable before," he drawled, sneering. "I do what is asked of me, Lestrange, and I do it well. Which is more that certain others can say."

The strategy was to speak true statements without directly answering her questions, and to keep her talking for as long as possible, until the effects of the potion began to wear off. Or he passed out. Whichever came first. But most of all, he would absolutely _not_ slur his words. That would be beyond toleration.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"I think you know perfectly well. You were, after all, there that night."

"Lucius was in charge! Not me! The Dark Lord has told me that he wishes he had allowed me to plan the attack. If it had been me, we _would_ have that prophesy!"

"I was not speaking of you specifically, Bellatrix. However, it appears that you feel...dare I say, guilty?"

"Why you disgusting little..." Bellatrix raised her wand, and Rodolphus decided it was time to intervene. It wasn't that he cared for Snape, specifically- in fact, just the opposite- but he simply detested the sight of blood, and violence was so...undignified. For the victim, of course. Bellatrix was hardly capable of undignified, did not have an unrefined bone in her body, but she was a visionary, a believer in The Cause in a way he never could be. Some people said insanity; he said dedication.

"The time, Bella."

"Oh yes. Yes. Severus, clever boy, has been trying to distract me. Now why would he do that, hmm? I must ask myself these questions, as a faithful servant of our Lord. I must ask. You may have tricked our Master, but you cannot hide forever. All we have to do is...wait. But to return to the task at hand: there is an Auror watch on the Weasley shack?"

How he wished he could just get up and leave- provided that he could even stand upright, but that was another matter. He had fallen in the ranks this past year because he was not able to provide the Dark Lord with the information necessary to capture Potter, and she...well, she had always been the apple of Voldemort's degenerate eye.

"Really, Bellatrix, if you persist in asking that which you know already, I shall have no choice but to assume that a burning desire for my company is the actual reason for this _rendezvous_."

She tilted her head sideways, considered his words, found them patently ridiculous, and smirked. "Answer the question. I know how much you like to _please._"

She could not be bringing up..._that_. In public? Could she?

He successfully fought off a flush of humiliation, but conceded this one.

"Selwyn and Mulciber verified it."

She nodded.

"So, one may surmise, might one not, that some protections would be placed on the residences of other Order members?"

"One might."

"And if one were to surmise this, what may one proceed to surmise would be the kinds of wards that may or may not be placed upon these residences?"

"Well, that would depend on whether one thinks that it is likely that the wards that may or may not be placed on certain residences would be similar to the wards that are most probably placed upon residences on which wards are known to be placed."

Severus was in the middle of formulating the rest of this appropriately vague and convoluted reply, when he felt her tear into his mind... ripping, tearing, brutal. He was unprepared, carelessly, irresponsibly unprepared, for the intrusion, so when she wrenched out the information she needed, he could not hold on to it. Later, he would blame the toxins in his blood, he would tell himself that it was impossible to remain unaffected by that much Veritaserum, that Dumbledore would have understood.

Meanwhile, Bellatrix was wiping the sweat off his brow with her blood-stained handkerchief, leaving ruddy smudges across his face.

"Auntie Bella doesn't mean any harm. She never means harm, just help..."

In the single-mindedness of her madness, she had managed to breach his mental wards. Not even the Dark Lord had gotten that far. But of all the things he knew, why did she extract that useless piece? It could have been worse, really. Had she seen something compromising, he would have had no choice but to kill her, the useless husband, and the impudent Russian. And he really had no idea how he would explain away _that_ mess.

Voices, overheard at headquarters a few days ago, naming the places that warranted a round-the-clock Auror patrol.

"_Harry's, the Burrow, Bill and Fleur's, and the HQ is covered already. That it?"_

"_Wait, what about Emmeline Vance?"_

"_We just don't have the resources for another one, Tonks. Maybe she can move in with __someone?"_

"_Hmmm? Now whom did you have in mind? Perhaps a certain tall, dark, and handsome Auror?"_

"_I don't know what you're talking about."_

"_Oh, come off it, Kingsley, I saw you making eyes at her at dinner."_

"_C__an we focus on the matter at hand, please?"_

Here, he had pushed her out of his mind. What followed in that conversation had been much more compromising.

What did this tell her? Surely they weren't planning an attack on Potter? Potter was under constant surveillance, by several Aurors, at all hours of the day and night. There were highly sophisticated wards on his person, his house, his street, and his neighborhood.

Did she care that Shaklebolt may or may not be exchanging bodily fluids with Vance?

Was she interested in the rather obvious fact that the Order considered Potter and the Weasleys most likely to be attacked?

But perhaps they were planning to attack someone, not Potter or the Weasleys, but someone less central to the cause, someone whose house would be less secure. Perhaps, they wanted to interrogate...or lure Potter. Maybe it was Weasley Elder and the French wife. Vance? Lupin?

And then it struck him. Granger. Hermione Bloody Granger. Why didn't he realize sooner? Why had those incompetents who Albus trusted to plan these things not foreseen this? One witch, barely of age, alone in an utterly Muggle area, would be a conveniently vulnerable target.

And, worst of all, not only were there no Aurors watching the house, as had been inadvertently revealed to Lestrange, there were no wards to speak of. Moody's rationale had been that a large amount of magical activity in a Muggle area would draw the attention of the Improper Use of Magic Office, which, Moody, that bloody paranoiac, suspected was full of Death-Eater spies. Potter's little suburb, through some careful maneuvering on Dumbledore's part, had been virtually taken off the Ministy's map, but this invisibility required the presence of at least three highly skilled wizards in the vicinity for its maintenance, and not a one could be spared from the crucial task of protecting the Boy Who Should Never Have Been Born. But it would be idiocy itself to go ahead with the assumption of no obstacles based on a shred of memory extracted from an Occlumens like himself.

Unfortunately, Bellatrix, against all previous tendency, had made careful, deliberate preparations for the success of the plot. Her husband had been dispatched to perform surveillance upon the Granger residence every day for the past week. His contact in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, a specialist in detecting fields of magical energy particular to wards, had set up equipment in the shrubbery of the house across from the Mudblood's and managed to discover absolutely nothing. For the sake of operational security, Bellatrix had him perform his experiments under the Imperius curse, and Obliviated him afterward. Twice.

Rodulphus had seen no one on his vigil, and therefore assumed that the house was unwatched by either Aurors or Order members. Dolohov had been less certain, and was unwilling to take the evidence of the thoroughly incompetent Rodolphus, or the notoriously shifty Snape, but Bellatrix was wearing an intractable look, and he couldn't quite figure out a way to get out of doing this intact.

Severus stubbornly clung to the notion that he had formed in childhood: that Bellatrix was simply not the type to employ foresight, or planning, or intelligent consideration, that she had an ironically Gryffindor propensity to rush mindlessly into action and accomplish her ends with brute force. Given his belief, Snape thought it more than likely that Lestrange and her two henchmen would simply invade the Granger house, wands ablaze, uncaring that the Order may be waiting for them inside, and Bellatrix would certainly not deny herself an opportunity to sharpen her skills with the Unforgivables. But they would find no one waiting inside besides two middle-aged Muggles and their know-it-all chit of a daughter.

A bright light was intruding on his field of vision, and Snape found it hard to see the figures moving in front of him. The realization that he was quickly descending into toxic shock brought not a quiver of emotion. It was too late for Granger, and probably for him as well; the three Death Eaters had already gone.

And the smell, that horrid maddening smell would not abate.

It was the stench of hell, of decay, of degradation, his own...

With a nauseating lurch, Snape fell out of consciousness.

Summary: Antonin Dolohov, Rodolphus, and Bellatrix Lestrnage plan the attack on the Grangers in the Riddle House. Dolohov raises concerns about possible protections on the house, and Snape is summoned to give testimony. Spinner's End, in decrepit condition, is introduced as the place where Snape has been living with Pettigrew, his assigned watchdog, for the past few weeks. Snape sustains Veritaserum poisoning at Bellatrix's hands, and inadvertently surrenders a memory which suggests that the Order has left Granger's house unprotected. Snape is unable to prevent the others from leaving with the information.


	5. Both Soiled Hands

Disclaimer: id.

CH 5. Both Soiled Hands

Summarized at end.

_The previous day..._

The sun was drowning by degrees as she lingered on the periphery of the yard. Her shadow grew long over the dirt road, over the dogwood bushes, over many years' regret, to tarry on a toothless whitewashed fence which marked a point of no return. Past the border, she would be visible from the house.

She had buried her dog in this yard. In this yard she had lain prey for mosquitoes on a hundred humid nights. Here, between the frenzied living earth and the unbreachable silence of the sky, she had aspired and dreamt and wept.

An exile by choice.

In one dampened palm she clutched a crumpled bit of _parchment,_ not _paper_, the very final draft of her speech. Accusations, recriminations. Rage. All tethered and forced at wand point behind a tightly held poise.

* * *

In the hallway, Dolohov turned to Bellatrix and asked:

"You're leaving him like that?"

Bella was reveling in the invigorating rush of adrenalin that always preceded an evening of her favorite sport, and, much like a Quiddich devotee before a match, was driven to distraction by insuperable fantasies.

"Who?"

"Snape. I don't think we're supposed to kill him."

"It's _his_ speciality."

"It didn't occur before you stabbed him?" Her husband questioned, and if a trace of apprehension over the thought her words implied gnawed at him, he gave no outward sign.

"Priorities, my dear. The mission requires all my faculties." Her voice was scornful.

"Indeed." Rodolphus sighed. He muttered the incantation to summon Toad, the single house elf of Riddle Manor, a gift from the Rockwood family.

The little creature, old and crippled but notable for his discretion, materialized and regarded the humans with one blinded and one swollen eye. Had anyone bothered to notice, which of course no one did, they would have been surprised that the elf was not only conscious, but also upright, considering the myriad wounds, cuts and bruises that covered his body, all untended, unbandaged, and infected. Approximately 48 hours after the conversation in the hall, Wormtail would discover Toad's putrefied corpse in a kitchen cupboard, and a small emergency committee would convene to decide the donor of the next house elf, before the Dark Lord was inconvenienced.

Bellatrix gave a grunt of exasperation.

"Meet us outside when you've finished."

Rodolphus fished in his pocket and extracted a parchment, on which he wrote: _We are in need of __one bezoar from Snape's stores._

Underneath he signed his name.

"Go to Spinner's End and obtain a bezoar. If Pettigrew questions you, give him this note. When you have taken it, return here and administer it to Snape, in the library."

"Yes, Master Lestrange."

His annual deed of goodwill completed, Rodolphus left for the grounds to join his wife, Antonin, and the fourth member of their party, who had most likely just arrived from the Ministry.

A quarter-hour later, Snape's eyes slitted open to register the ill-favored face of Toad.

He was surprised that anyone had bothered to check on him at all, even if it was just the ancient house elf.

Bothering him was a persistent, but stubbornly amorphous feeling that there was something urgent he had to do.

What was it? When he saw Lestrange again, he would hex her into a messy oblivion for this.

The elf was prodding his knee.

A beaker of water was unceremoniously thrust under his nose. Snape was grateful; his tongue tasted like he had spent the past hour licking asphalt.

Toad, keeping his eyes resolutely downcast said: "Master Snape, The Dark Master is calling you to his study."

"What did you give me?"

"Bezoar, Master Snape,_ disgusting_ _Half Blood _."

The house elf muttered the last under his breath. Snape wondered whether it was senility, or whether he was meant to hear it. Deciding it didn't matter either way, he made a quick assessment of the odds: a large part of a bottle of Muggle whiskey (weaker than tea, really), knife wound to the shoulder (unpleasant, but not critical), Veritaserum overdose, countered by the bezoar (which nullified the poison but the not the compulsion to honesty).

Pulling himself together, Snape determined that this meeting would go better than the previous one. He stumbled onto unsteady feet and made a precarious effort to transport himself to the study with minimal damage.

Lord Voldemort, as he was wont to do in the early hours of night, was poring over one of his many esoteric scripts, hunched over the mammoth desk beneath the window, his viperous familiar curled about his feet. The sulphur stench was nearly more than Snape could stand at this proximity.

The Dark Lord was rotting alive: a soul inhabited the body, but the body was in the most essential sense, still dead.

A minuscule cough diverted red eyes from a Cyrillic translation; they scanned the ceiling for a moment before settling on the gaunt man hovering by the entrance. From beneath his hand, Snape said:

"You asked for me, my Lord?"

"Ah, Severus, come in," Voldemort wheezed, "close the door."

Snape did as he was asked with his hand behind him, without turning his back to the Dark Lord. Now, he was trapped in there with the smell.

The Dark Lord's customary appraisal yielded the customary results: the lank, unwashed hair, the shadowed face, the cloak that seemed to disappear into the darkness of the room.

"A minister of the church. A striking resemblance, really. Are you familiar with the term?"

"Yes, my Lord."

Snape willed himself not to flinch away from the huddled creature. Since his occupation of the regenerated body, Voldemort exuded an aura of pure wrongness, a physical presence profoundly unnatural, a dangerously unstable magical field. Academically, Snape was aware that if the vessel and the entity it housed operated on different energy levels, each would battle to reject the other as two incompatible magnets.

"You would, I suppose. Sometimes, it is difficult to remember that your father was a filthy Muggle."

Funny, Snape thought, Voldemort couldn't remember while he couldn't forget.

The Dark Lord chuckled as Snape looked away.

"But your mother, except for that grievous lapse of judgment, was a witch remarkably talented in the Dark Arts. Such a pity."

"Yes, my Lord." Listening to that o-so-fucking-blasé comment was like drinking sour milk.

"Do you know why I have called you here, Severus?"

It was then, at perhaps the most inopportune time, that Snape remembered about Granger. How long had he been unconscious? He thought it was probably too late, but inaction was not an option. Perhaps he could cast a discreet messenger Patronus when the Dark Lord wasn't looking.

And perhaps the Dark Lord would suddenly break out into an Irish jig.

Voldemort's parchment face was peering at him in question.

"No, my Lord."

"Good. It would worry me if you did. Come, Severus."

The Dark Lord beckoned with his claw-like fingers, and Snape, like an insect snared by a web, was pulled irrevocably in.

"I would like you to do something for me, Severus."

"I would be honored, my Lord."

"Yes, of course. It is a matter of the utmost importance, and will require considerable skill to execute. I hope you are equal to the task."

"I will do all in my power to succeed."

"Of that I have no doubt, Severus," Riddle spoke even, and thought the threat was unvoiced, it tainted each of his expressions.

"It is not your abilities that cause me concern, but your discretion."

"My Lord..."

"Do not interrupt." Voldemort's voice was deadly. "But I am not unreasonable. The task which I have set for you is without doubt an unpleasant one, and I know that you have been making an effort. In fact, if not for the information you managed to obtain, the plan would have been significantly more difficult to orchestrate."

Snape paid Voldemort for the right to draw breath with information. He paid Albus for not withdrawing the testimony that kept him out of Azkaban with the same. Between those commitments, he bartered facts, half-truths and lies like poker chips. Sometimes he gambled other people's lives.

_That does _not_ make me responsible,_ Snape thought.

Would he have acted differently if he had foreknown this to be the outcome? He could not honestly say that he would.

"You are aware of my intent?"

_A coward, through and through, Snivellus._

The internal voices which mocked him, even after all these years, were those of the Maurauders.

"Not as such, my Lord."

"It was not breached in your chat with Bellatrix tonight?"

"I wouldn't call it a chat, my Lord, given that she attempted to poison me."

Voldemort's fingers, ghosting over the symbols before him, froze.

"Poisoning?"

"Veritaserum."

Snape felt absurdly like a child telling a parent about the misdeed of a badly-behaved sibling.

"Bella can be a little over-zealous at times, Severus. Do not take it to heart. Although I must confess that if it were not for the doubts that I expressed to her in private, perhaps she would not have dared. There is no cause for ill-feeling, however, as you appear quite unharmed and will have an instrumental part to play in tonight's events. You see, I intend for you to be the one to inform Potter that I have in my possession his Mudblood friend."

Snape counterfeit an expression of shock for the Dark Lord's benefit. He had guessed correctly; they intended to use Granger as bait.

"Inform him? But my Lord, Potter distrusts me. Surely he will suspect any information I give him."

"Were it not for your ineptitude with the social graces, Severus, perhaps you would have already formed a friendship with the Potter boy as I have asked you to do. Since this is not the case, you will have to utilize the Polyjuice Potion to transform into one of Dumbledore's lackeys with whom the boy has a rapport. The werewolf, perhaps? The task should be simple enough, even for you. Potter's weakness is his childish sentimentality, and that arrogant propensity to act without thinking so particular to Gryffindors. He will not be able to resist coming to the Mudblood's rescue. And when he does, I will, at last, be rid of the meddlesome brat."

"At last, my Lord."

Snape knew Potter, and the Dark Lord's insight was on the money. It would be his death, no doubt, but he would tell the boy nothing.

"You, know, Severus, you used to be more convincing." Voldemort's mouth slitted in a garish smile as Snape's eyes widened- just the smallest fraction, but nevertheless. Perhaps he really was slipping. "You do not honor me as before. Is it because of the girl? I offered her her life, you know, for your sake. I even offered her a position in my ranks, because of her talent with charms. But she was a Mudblood and worse, a simple-minded fool. Do you know what she said, before I cast the killing curse? 'Evil like you will never triumph while there are good people in the world, and love.' Love! It does not surprise me that her spawn is so irredeemably mawkish, and it will be his downfall as surely as it was hers."

It was a victory borne of two decades of iron-willed self control that Snape betrayed no emotion at this pronouncement. Inside, the soul that had lain dormant for an age screamed in fierce but futile protest at this desecration of its altar, for Lily Evans had been nothing less than the idol of Severus Snape's heart since he had glimpsed her at the playground in 1966.

"Indubitably, my Lord."

"Do you still harbor..._emotions._.. for her?"

"No, my Lord. It was a trifling childhood infatuation, nothing more."

If only that were true, how simple things would be.

"I am glad to hear it. It would be acutely unpleasant to me to have a servant so imbecilic as to believe in 'love', the purview of weak souls and weaker minds. I have bean weary of including you in this scheme, Severus. It is difficult to trust a wizard who can fool the enemy with shows of obeisance and loyalty. Can such a one not fool me? I thought. I have searched your mind; I have even gone so far as to put you under harsh questioning, to have your actions monitored by Wormtail, but I have discovered no treachery. Perhaps there is none."

"Your faith in me is most gratifying, my Lord."

The Dark Lord studied Snape dispassionately.

"Faith. That is it, precisely. I give you this assignment on the guarantee of faith, Severus. Fail me at your peril. Succeed, and I will honor you among your peers."

Voldemort steepled his fingers in an unconscious gesture of self-importance and Snape thanked the divine powers that he was a devout admirer of the ironic and absurd, otherwise the evening's events would have long since sent him into a neurotic fit.

"What you see before us, Severus," Voldemort gestured at the parchment scrolls covering the desktop, "are the instructions of preparation for the Constrictum Animus."

Snape was distracted from his futile search for an exit excuse by the sheer improbability of the thing. The recipe was rumored to have been lost centuries ago. It was, at most, the inutile culmination of Herpo the Foul's lifetime of research into the field of Necromancy. A Level Thirteen Restricted Substance according to the Ministry's antediluvian codex, never mentioned in polite academic circles, and too obscure to be known outside of them.

"The original source, of course, transcribed by a disciple of Herpo's after he had gone blind, was lost in the Crusades."

"The Crusades?"

"Muggle barbarism. Thousands of ancient magical texts destroyed by the vulgar, ignorant hands of beasts. Those with no appreciation for the majesty of the written word are little better than animals, Severus."

"Yes, my Lord." This was a point upon which they could agree.

"It is, at best, an imprecise translation, in Old Slavonic, a language which has unfortunately fallen out of use. It does bear a certain similarity to its modern offshoots, but the two Death Eaters who may have deciphered this page can be no use. Karkaroff, the traitor and your great friend, is dead. And Antonin has not the scholar's mind, unlike you and I."

He had not been present at Igor's exceptionally brutal murder five months ago, but Bellatrix, ever considerate, had given him her memory of the evening as a commemorative gift.

Although Severus Snape, on principle, did not have friends, he and Karkaroff had bonded over their common appreciation of Dark Arts theory and shared loathing of dunderhead students. He had been the only one who made it a point to exchange more than the cursory pleasantries with Severus at the Malfoys' annual Boxing Day party. Of all the insufferable characters with whom the Dark Lord surrounded himself, he had been, in Snape's opinion, the least insufferable.

Then, Voldemort said: "I want you to make it."

_And really, he should have seen that coming. His entire life was a painfully prolonged advert for Murphy's Law. _

"I beg your pardon, my Lord?"

"I have made an approximate translation. I'm certain that a Potion's Master of your caliber will be able to piece together the technicalities of Herpo's method...with this schematic." The Dark Lord had never been stingy with his praise. He was even less reticent with his displeasure.

"But my Lord, the potion has not been brewed for three thousand years." A joke surely. It had to be.

"But it has been brewed, that is the important thing. If something can be done once, it can be done again. You are a capable man, Severus, an intelligent man. You will figure it out. That I have chosen you for this is a mark of favor, Severus, and I expect you to show proper gratitude."

"I apologize, my Lord. I was stunned by the magnitude of the task. It is a great honor."

"I should hope that you think so."

"May I be so bold as to ask why my Lord is in need of this particular potion?"

The Dark Lord studied Snape intently, weighing possibility, passing judgment.

Herpo, the wizard Voldemort liked to consider his intellectual predecessor, had dedicated his life to the study of the forbidden, dangerous magiks; he had been determined to compile the extensive knowledge of his antecedents into a comprehensive encyclopaedia. For better or for worse, the cabal of Dark Mages he succeeded had been massacred by mercenaries engaged by the International Confederation of Wizards, all the wisdom passed down through the ages within that enclave destroyed in one day of murder and chaos. Herpo was intent upon recovering the lost arts, and, to this end, created a potion that could summon souls from the underworld, and bind them to an empty vessel, a corpse. He had questioned reincarnations of the Dark Wizards, transcribed the spells, curses, hexes of which they told him, and banished them back to hell.

Voldemort remembered the first year out of school he spent working in Borgin and Burke's as an assistant. Empty and strangely directionless after those first murders, he languished in the anonymity provided by his position in the artifact shop, the freedom from the obligations of a school life: forced, false politeness, feigned interest and attention, time wasted on superficial duties, time away from his experiments. He had sampled the heady taste of liberty, at long last, and found himself infuriatingly unable to reify his vague hopes of power and knowledge into a concrete scheme for their attainment. He took to reading the various tomes in the shop to pass the time, and one day stumbled across a journal of notes by Herpo the Foul. He didn't know it then, however; the seventeen year old Riddle worked assiduously to translate the text he instinctively felt was imbued with a darkness his soul understood. In between rote appointments with potential sellers, he read frantically, obliterating the odium of his unexceptional existence by a vicarious reliving of Herpo's exploits. That diary was the first source from which he had heard of the Constrictum Animus; it was one of the few things he took with him when he disappeared from England.

Now, the tension produced by his body's attempts to expel his spirit was becoming a dangerous distraction. Perhaps he should not have used the boy's blood to restore his physical being. Or, perhaps, he had reached that threshold of which Herpo had written, when the fragment of soul left within the living body becomes too unstable, too transient, to stick.

"A precaution."

"A precaution, My Lord?" Snape was pushing his luck and he knew it. But he figured a couple of Crucios was a small price to pay for this information.

"I must have full function of my body, Severus." Those crimson irises blossomed rage, unsound and inhuman and perfect, and Snape was mesmerized; he could not look away._ "You will. You must."_ A whisper, light as a half-forgotten dream, across his mind. It was a caress, brutal in its very subtlety, that caught him so distracted that he capitulated control without a quiver of resistance.

He must. He would.

"Not a word of this to anyone."

"No, my Lord."

In a dark corner of the hall, the chime of an old clock struck and echoed the hour, reaching the study with a mournful but resolute pitch.

In a instant, Voldemort became alert, listening intently, his eyes narrowed.

"How many was that?"

"Twelve, my Lord."

"You are mistaken."

Snape pulled out a timepiece from his pocket, uncovered the face, and handed it over for his Master's inspection.

Midnight.

"I told Bellatrix that I expect them no later than twelve. Where are they?"

"I was not privy to their plan, my Lord, but it is possible that there were complications."

"What complications? Are you not my spy in the Order of the Phoenix? If they change their arrangements, I expect you to be aware of it. And do not tell me that they are suspicious of you. That is no one's fault but your own. You must try harder, Severus. Find out what's keeping them. Go!"

"Yes, my Lord."

Backing slowly out of his Master's presence, Snape keeled over from the waist to show appropriate respect. Relieved to have reached the door, he fumbled for the knob, and once through, had to contain himself lest he give into the impulse to run down the hall. Snape had never been at ease in the presence of the Dark Lord, even before the war when His temper had not been abridged to a tiny wick by the vagaries of circumstance and fruitless effort, but the past year had him quailing at the thought of being called before his Master, so erratic, so terrible was He. But, compared to some, it had been an easy night, Snape thought. So far.

His Lordship held court in the dilapidated mansion of His ancestors, whose blood heritage was so distasteful a subject to Voldemort that he never permitted reference to the previous owners within his hearing. Patches of wallpaper unsoiled by age marked the spots from which portraits of the Riddle family, knights and rentiers and socialites, had been removed. Instead of adorning the empty walls of the main hall with wizard tableaus, a common method of surveillance in magical homes, the Dark Lord had attached to the wall, with the aid of a permanent sticking charm, the extricated eyeballs of Igor Karkaroff.

The gray eyes, as expressionless in death as they had been in life, swiveled to follow Snape's movements as he traversed the corridor on his way outside.

* * *

Crates of rotting produce, unwanted mementos from the morning's bazaar, cluttered the dark alleyway where one Muggleborn witch spent the better part of a quarter-hour being violently sick in a garbage tin. Ignored by one moonlighting policeman and half a dozen scavenging rodents, Hermione tried to quell the maelstrom waging war on her tenuous self-control. Control which had to be kept at all costs. But she was floundering, shaken, disoriented though she had planned for this, not in the sense of foreseeing their deaths, but in being certain that she was falling towards an inevitable disaster. It could have been Harry, or Ron. It could have been her.

To no one, to everyone in the insensible city, in the insensible world, she whispered:

"God... my parents..."

And from within the depths of her tormented consciousness, a voice answered: _"Dead."_

"No!"

"_And burnt."_

"I..."

"_To a bloody crisp. And there is no one to blame but..."_

"It's a lie!"

Fragmented images flitted to the forefront, evasive, refusing to resolve themselves into a cogent order. She shoved them back, terrified and ashamed.

"_Their blood is on your hands."_

And, indeed, blood had dried her sleeve hems rigid, crusted under her fingernails, made rivulets across her pallid knuckles.

"It's not! I must have cut myself, I..."

"_They had it coming, you know."_

"I didn't want to do it...I swear...please, I swear, please, _please..._ "

Raucous, unhinged and shrill, laughter echoed in Hermione's head.

"_Liar, liar."_

"Shut up!"

"_But I'm not real: just a voice inside your head."_

These delirious ramblings reached the ears of one Sebastian Neils, neighborhood thug and aspiring drug dealer, as he made his way home from the apartment of his recently deceased brother. Funny thing, life: one day you're about to catch your big break with a with massive shipment of Colombian cocaine, and the next, you're a million little pieces of blood and bone in an exploded subway station. "Nothing left, nothing to bury," Ma had been crying ever since.

Humming, flicking his vintage switchblade in loops through the air, he considered the twitching bundle cowering against the alley wall. Given the hour and the locale, he was not surprised to happen upon a vagabond in the midst of a virulent argument with the voices in her own head. Deciding that a bag lady was unlikely to posses anything worth stealing, and was, in her derangement, liable to lash out at passerby, he continued on his merry way.

Hermione, preoccupied with her internal dialogue, was oblivious to his appraisal.

"Oh God, oh My God, please."

"_Turning to religious delusion in your 'hour of need'? Daddy would say that's pathetic. Well, would have said."_

Still, the words insinuated themselves into her mind:

"Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses,"

"As we forgive those who trespass against us."

"And lead us not into temptation,"

"But deliver us from evil."

"_A little too late for that."_

A memory long misplaced surfaced: years ago, in an age before conscious time, she is walking down the hallway, lured by a mysterious whispered chant. The closet door is open; inside, she finds the dusty overcoats- the ones nobody uses- parted on a space where her mother kneels, hunched over a shoe box, muttering the prayer to herself.

She could see it in excruciating detail: the stains on the carpet, the dust caught swirling slowly in the dying sunlight, her mother's lips forming each syllable with the desperate conviction of one for whom the words had long been a painful but unequivocal truth.

The moment had taken on a quality of the surreal. Like dissociation. An out of body experience. It was a welcome relief.

She struggled to remember where she was. What she was doing. Because _doing_ was the only thing she could do now. _Thinking_ about it, _analyzing_ it, _remembering_ it: she flinched away from these as though they would burn her.

She had woken up with the prodding of a solicitous passenger, who, having noticed the symptoms, had taken the liberty of calling the paramedics. Of course, they came running to her aid exactly when she _didn't_ need it. They would have been useless in the face of her magical injuries and she thought that, altogether, the fewer people saw her, the better. At the next stop, she sneaked past the waiting ambulance and realized that she was in his neighborhood. And that was odd because things were going almost _too_ well which could only mean that when the shit finally hit the fan, the mess would be absolutely _colossal_.

Asking Percy for help was, she admitted, a better idea than hiding out until...well, she hadn't thought it through that far. She spared a moment of horror at her uncharacteristic- and probably dangerous- lack of perspicacity, but was too drained to be able to weigh her options. Not enough, however, to prevent a rush of inwardly-directed vitriol at the failure. If she got killed or imprisoned or discovered, it would be entirely the fault of her own idiotic, arrogant self. Because, really, what was more fitting than a smug moron jumped-up on her supposed brilliance hoisted by her own wretched petard?

She was acutely aware that probability, statistics, and common sense all dictated that she should be dead. They were impossible odds, utterly and completely. A remarkable streak of luck that the very nature of things could not sustain for much longer.

Percy's building was politely monochromatic, surrounded by fussy little ficus bushes fastidiously shaped into spheres. Hermione thought that it suited him extremely well. In the two years since the former Head Boy had quarreled with his parents, only Ron had visited his London flat, and only once. It was a miracle that she'd managed to find it. The directory informed her that "P.I. Weasley" resided in unit 33A.

Hermione could not figure out whether she was doing something extremely clever, or something extremely stupid. But that was hardly new. She'd gone thoroughly numb: a monumental and undeserved mercy.

She toyed with the idea of going to Headquarters (Grimmauld Place was relatively close); but if she showed up asking for help, there would be questions which she would really rather not answer. Not to mention the sheer _indignity_ of asking for help. It would ruin in one moment the reputation she had slaved to create over six years, and besides, it wasn't as if she were at death's door. As far as Harry and Ron were concerned, Hermione Granger didn't _have_ problems, let alone run to others to solve them. And the rest of the Order: her dearly respected Professors, her possible future employers, the contacts she would cultivate for her professional life, would she throw all that away over this, such an intimate, _personal_ issue? And it was very personal, certainly not for public consumption or public knowledge. It was her damned business, and no one else's.

No. It was unthinkable. For, no matter the justification, the Unforgivables were aptly named not simply because they merited a verdict of death, but because they marred the soul of the wielder with an indelible stain. The living damned were cast away or locked up, lest they contaminate the rest.

So, it stood to reason that her friends would drop her like a hotcake, more so since they were such fundamentally decent individuals. Professor McGonagall would say that Hermione had failed them, the Order, that her faith in her protégé had been misplaced. Because the Order, and all the sympathetic, absolutely_ reviled _violence, or, heaven forbid, the use of Offensive magic, instead of defensive.

She would be expelled.

_Expelled!_

And given the political climate within the wizarding community, given her _unfortunate _parentage_,_ given that the deceased were blood relations of certain families that held the Ministry within their seemingly bottomless pockets, she would be very surprised indeed if an inquest didn't have a Kiss goodbye attached at the end of it. _Ministry Arrests Dangerous and Deranged Muggleborn Murderer. Upstanding Citizen Lucius Malfoy says: "In this tragedy we see a classic example of how the divide of culture and custom between our world and__** theirs **__can lead to harm and heartbreak." _

And, although Hermione Granger was a devotee of rules of any sort, she knew enough to know that they were only worth as much as they coincided with one's interest, and only kind to those who followed them.

There was a possibility that she could cry to Dumbledore about self-defense, and he would cover it up. But people would still _know_. She would walk into a room, and they would stare, and they would _know_. She would apply for a job somewhere, and they would _know_. She would be purchasing a book in Flourish & Blotts, and they would _know_. How was she supposed to live like that? What did she have, besides her reputation? Nothing.

Only Harry would understand why she had done it. Bellatrix had, after all, murdered his godfather and Harry had sworn vengeance. But did he mean it, the boy who had freed the man who gave Voldemort his parents' location, who had risked life and limb to save Sirius and Ginny from certain death? No. Harry Potter did the right thing. Harry Potter would have shown mercy. And, she?

A dull ache settled in the pit of her stomach. For all the Headmaster's talk about choice, she never seemed to have any; life just _happened_ around her, and she was invariably, immutably forced to react. Delimited by their expectations, their conventions, their unsatisfiable_ wanting_, her choices shriveled like a bubotuber drained of pus. It wasn't _fair_.

She caught herself staring at her own reflection in the glass panes of the entrance door like some hapless mouth-breather. Now was _not_ the time.

Minutes later, when Hermione was lifting her fist to the peeling paint of Percy's door, it occurred to her that she looked horrid. Which, considering her usual non-standards, was really saying something. She wore transfigured clothes, a paltry testament to her record in McGonagall's class, and her hair was a sleep-tangled mess.

What if he questioned her? What if it was obvious? She felt branded, filthy. Surely he would take one look at her and know what she had done?

_Don't be absurd Granger. Percy always liked you. Hecate knows why. _

Smoothing her hair and straightening her coat, she tried to emulate her usual style: clean, non-offensive, unremarkable.

Hermione remembered Sirius, whispering to her about his years in captivity in that holllow voice. Then, she had listened with the rapt fascination with which the sheltered regard the grotesque, never expecting to get closer to the reality than his feverish remembrances. Now, that prison, with shadow guards and shadow inmates, was a very tangible possibility. How could she have been so...w_hat? Unprepared? Stupid? _

_Cruel?_

Surprisingly (or perhaps not, given his tendencies) Percy opened the door still clothed in his Ministry robes. It was a little past 1 AM.

"Merlin's toenail fungus, Hermione!"

"Hello, Percy." The nonchalant tone she'd opted for contrasted absurdly with the circumstances.

They stared at each other in the midst of an awkward silence; she, attempting to take up as little space as possible, he, studying her disheveled appearance with something akin to horror.

"You look a mess!" he blurted, then looked embarrassed. And she was well aware, thank-you very much. Besides it's not as if he was exactly centerfold material either.

"Yeah, I know. Can I…er…come in?"

Percy held the door for his visitor, watching her progress with both worry and suspicion.

Hermione followed him into a small, immaculately neat living room. She could sense that he had made a conscious effort to sever all ties with his Weasley heritage; his rooms had none of the shabby comfort of the Burrow, and were, instead, austerely practical, well-organized, and aesthetically inoffensive.

Casting a discreet Silencing charm on the front door, he turned to regard her with a four-eyed stare and said:

"I'm terribly sorry, Hermione, but I have to make sure..." his wand was pointed at her chest, "that you are who you appear to be. The last time you were here…" he paused for thought, "what was different about this room?"

Hermione looked around, uncertain. There was no noticeable change; it still had the air of a hotel room turned into a permanent residence.

She glanced at His Royal Highness, the Prat, who was angling to send a hex her way.

_Self-absorbed git_, she thought, _expects me to remember the details of his bloody _décor?

Unpainted walls. Trite landscape portraits. Beige carpet. The dull underbelly of dull, calculated to please everyone. She could admire that.

Wait. Beneath her feet was an oriental rug, overlaid in a pattern of maroon and dark-green, lively enough that she could safely presume it new.

"I see you bought this nice rug. You know, it really brightens up the place."

Percy grinned at the cusp of what he probably thought was a good line:

"I'm so glad that you noticed. The Minister said the exact same thing! "

"So am I. Believe me." Percy, much like his sister, was a deft hand with the Bat-Boogey.

"Yes, well. Formalities, you know. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

She fished for a plausible story, her eyes canvassing the surroundings, looking for inspiration. They paused on the refracted glare thrown across the floorboards by a brass coat rack, and jumped to the sallow orb visible through the window.

"I had a...an encounter, with...um...a werewolf...barely managed to escape..."

"Sweet Circe! Here? In the city?"

..._and he was actually going for it,_ Hermione thought_. Anyone that dumb almost _deserved _to be lied to._

"Yes! I was so frightened. It came out of nowhere!"

Hermione felt vaguely nauseous; this damsel-in-distress business was not pretty stuff. She saw Percy's eyes widen at the possible implications. He noticed the blood on her sleeves, and took an involuntary step back; she hurried to reassure him.

"It didn't get me. I was trying to escape and I slipped, and fell down some stairs."

_Of course you did. Managed to _run_ away from a _super-human_ creature, and then fell down _stairs_,_ Hermione thought. Not for the first time, she wished that she was a better liar. "Something must have scared it away, because it didn't follow me after that. But, it was so…" a well-appointed, if slightly overdone shudder, "…horrible. Its teeth…and the eyes were insane! I thought I'd be dead for sure. And then, well, I was so panicked I didn't know what to do. So I came here."

_Propagating bigoted stereotypes is what makes werewolves into second-class citizens. Unless of course, it suits your own purposes. Self righteous, sanctimonious hypocrite. Redundant illiterate._

"Well it's a wonder that you managed to survive, Hermione! What were you thinking, wandering around in the middle of the night, by yourself? Irresponsible!" In his recriminating tone was a trace of pleasure; he enjoyed playing disapproving parent. Always had. But she sat there looking so dejected that the metaphor struck hollow.

"I know. If you could give me some healing supplies, and maybe a glass of water, I'll get out of your hair."

"Are you badly hurt? St Mungo's…"

"No! I mean…um, it's nothing serious, I'm more rattled than anything." It was a lie: her head was throbbing, and the pain in her side was so bad she could have keeled over but for her determination to give him no cause for suspicion.

He sighed. "Well, come along, then. I have some things in the lavatory. Just basics, mind you."

"That should do. Thanks." Following Percy through his matchbox flat, she was ushered into the bathroom. White tiles, white walls.

Oddly enough, he stopped in the doorway, blocking her exit. In the mirror, their reflections watched each other. Stupid that she'd turned her back to him; now he had a clear shot.

_Wait, this is Percy you're accusing of dubious intentions. Percy the pontificator, the pompous prat, whom the merest whiff of wrongdoing would catapult into a self-righteous tizzy._

But beneath the fluorescent glow, his face was a papier-mâché theater mask, mouth contorted in an exaggerated frown, eyes empty. His hand moved inside his robe, and for a terrifying moment, she was sure he would attack her... but nothing happened.

"In the cabinet. Please help yourself." And just like that, he turned and walked away, leaving Hermione feeling foolish, attempting to will her frantic pulse into obedience. Still, it wouldn't hurt to ward the door, even if she was being inexplicably and unreasonably paranoid. Since she had yet to be arrested, Hermione guessed that her tentative hypothesis that _their_ wands were somehow off the radar- unregistered, perhaps- had a good probability of accuracy. Shaking fingers closed around a wooden handful as she extracted the stolen wands. At the zenith of his power, Grindelwald had taken not only the wands of each defeated opponent, but also the hands that wielded them.

_Trophies_. _To the victor, the spoils._

They were hers now, she thought with a pang of disgust and took her pick: there was her own, familiar, vine wood-she reached for it, just to feel the reassuring tug of affinity, but could not bring herself to touch it. This was the wand her eleven year old hands had cradled like a precious thing- the same hands which now felt defective and foreign. The others: a light ash, about nine inches; a nondescript blackwood; and a walnut that bore the marks of many years of careless use.

As her hand hovered above the last wand, she hesitated; where had it began, this ever-descending spiral of minuscule steps- each one so easy to justify- that brought her here, absurdly certain that to claim the wand would seal her fate? Hadn't she sealed it with the first curse?

_Pick it up, Granger. It's just a stick of wood._

Hermione had never believed in fate, and she was not about to start now. She picked it up. A jolt of pain, electric, burning, ran up her arm and through her body.T the wand, too, had registered the strange reaction; blue sparks spilled like water from the tip to crash and skitter across the floor.

She felt like she had been…

Swallowed.

A moment later, the claustrophobic, trapped feeling was gone.

'_Protego Totalum_ "she thought, as a thin line of silver light snaked around the doorframe to meet its tail and disappeared as she tried- and failed utterly- to not feel smug at performing such complex nonverbal magic, especially under the circumstances. But the bout of self-congratulation was cut short by a wave of exhaustion so overwhelming it made her knees go weak; realizing that she had overestimated, Hermione rested her forehead against the door- eyes shut on the dizzying room- and prayed for strength.

She turned: the face in the mirror, every one of whose changes she had scrutinized over the years- first with hope, then with crushing disappointment, then with weary resignation- which should have been as familiar to her as the smell of her own skin, was an alien creature staring back at her. She- and it- tilted her head. Did she really inhabit that… _thing_? It was as dead-pale as an Inferius, but the eyes were bright with sentience. _With malice._ Poised to reach its claw-like hand through the mirror and strangle her.

Her common sense, dragged up from whatever dimly-lit corner of her mind it had been cowering in, reasserted itself at that moment. To say that time was of the essence would be a grave understatement. The world was still spinning as she stood there gaping at herself like a fool, and if she didn't bloody well snap out of it, it would spin her straight to Azkaban. And, where was all her carefully-cultivated self control? Out to lunch at the very moment she needed it most? But what, after all, could one expect from a foolish, _emotional_ little girl?

Hermione pulled out the simple stud in her left ear, undid its transfiguration, resized it, and set it down on the counter. It was a knapsack, full of clothing, potions, supplies and ingredients, and all of her books. In short, her entire life, packed into a case out of which she had been living for the last three years. A sad little collection of a sad little life.

Her mental rolodex broke on the quote: "_When treating the injured party, first check for the regularity of blood flow" _she pinched her nails- pale, which indicated blood loss- "_responsiveness of the retinas. Assess external injuries."_

She lifted her shirt, and flinched. The blood on the periphery had caked dry, but its center was the same red _his_ blood had been. _Oozing_. The memory, so vivid, surged back.

_Stop it._

None too carefully, she prodded the gash, the pain of contact detonating stars in her line of sight. She caught her breath, and did it again. And again. Maybe she could let it fester; blood poisoning killed slow, after all, and she deserved to suffer.

_Stop it, for Merlin's sake. _

She ran her fingertip at the edge where skin broke on ragged flesh, dragging it out, savoring the pain.

_Stop._ _Enough._

Antiseptic. Witch hazel. Dittany. Blood Replenishing Potion. Removed and applied. She paused over an analgesic… and swallowed a wit-sharpening potion instead. There, the door, and thought it, the audience, the stage; she pulled Hermione Granger, the persona, around herself, and opened it.

Hearing her steps in the hall, Percy forced a smile onto his face. His inner Secrecy Sensor had taken issue with Hermione's explanation- a werewolf attack in London was a little far fetched, especially since he himself had authorized a wholesale round-up of the vicious cretins just last week- but his sense of Gryffindor loyalty insisted he take her at her word. Still, politics had taught him the art of justification - he decided to draw her out, distract her; hopefully she would back herself into a corner with fumbled explanations. Now if he could only figure out how to go about it.

"Hermione! Well, that was quick! I hope you found everything necessary...?"

"Yes, thanks Percy. I used some of your bruise balm, and took a Calming Draught. I hope you don't mind."

"Oh, not at all. Not at all. Have a seat. Can I offer you some tea?"

"Please."

Hermione shifted a pile of pamphlets from a chair, and sat down at a table stacked with scrolls and books of various shapes and sizes.

"Milk and sugar?"

"Neither, thank you."

"Lemon? Honey?"

"No, that's quite alright."

"Mint?"

"No! Um... just plain, thanks Percy." He was babbling, she realized; he was nervous. But why?

"I'm terribly sorry, Hermione, but you cannot stay long. I..we...have certain...obligations, you see. Responsibilities. I'm sure you understand?"

"Sure, I do." She didn't.

He had been afraid that the preamble would be awkward to deliver. But Hermione had always been a good, reasonable sort. It was she he had in mind when he told Ronald to marry a sensible girl.

Hermione surveyed her immediate surroundings while Percy fixed a tray of biscuits; it appeared that he was still used to burning the midnight oil, although whether from preference or necessity she could not tell.

For all his many faults, he was invariably well-mannered, Hermione thought as he handed her a cup of steaming Darjeeling. Her frigid fingers were grateful for the reprieve as she cradled the porcelain.

"As you can see, no doubt," he gesticulated at his paperwork, "we've had a rather busy week. The regulations for Trans-Continental Apparition are coming up for review, and the Minister has personally asked me to write up a report. Fascinating stuff!"

"Oh, I'm sure."

Luckily, Percy was one of those individuals who had trouble discerning any but the most heavy-handed sarcasm. Moreover, the possibility that anyone would find the goings-on at the Ministry less than thrilling seemed incomprehensible to him. She wanted to attempt to pry some information from the boy, and hoped it wasn't too early to play the flattery card.

"You must know a lot about the Ministry, then. I mean, yours is such an awfully important position, isn't it? Fudge is the public face, but you're the one behind the scenes, doing the essential work. The invisible hand, so to speak."

"Oh well," Percy said, flushing with pleasure,"I suppose I do make it my business to be as well informed as I can possibly be, since the Minister is always asking me for facts and names, and sometimes, even advice..."

"My goodness! Really?"

"Oh yes! Just last week he asked me whether I thought an applicant for the Department of Magic Regulation was trustworthy enough for the position."

It seemed that the Wheel of Fortune was making its turn, thought Hermione: Percy had inadvertently stumbled upon the very subject she was interested in.

"I should hope that he, or she, was! Its a very important department, isn't it?"

"Oh yes, gravely important. Second, perhaps, only to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Then again, the two are so inextricably linked."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, Magical Regulation monitors and discovers illegal Magical activity. If, say, an underage witch performs a spell, they report it to Improper Use of Magic; if some hooligans blow up a Muggle shop, they report to Magical Accidents and Catastrophes; if Dark Magic or the Unforgivables are performed, the Auror Office is alerted; and, of course, any inexplicable, impossible, or highly suspicious events are reported to the Department of Mysteries."

"How are they able to monitor the spell-work of so many people? I should think it would be immensely difficult."

"It is! It's extremely complex, so much, in fact, that....wait, why are you so interested in the operations of the M.R.D?"

"I..." She couldn't think of a single thing to say. "I can't tell you that. I'm sorry."

_Clever, Granger. Not. _

A thought struck her:_ Of course! The witch hazel counter-acted the armadillo bile in the Wit-Sharpening potion. Damn. _Her brain was bulging at the seams with information, and none of it was any good. She was making one careless mistake after another. It was shameful.

Percy rose from his chair and leaned across to her, so that their faces were barely a foot apart.

"I respect your integrity, Hermione, but I must say that I do not approve of the people you associate with. How can I tell you anything without being certain that you will not repeat my information to individuals who would use it for, shall we say, nefarious purposes?"

She neglected to point out that 'the people she associated with' were actually his own family, as it was unlikely to help matters. And, Good God, he _respected her integrity_? What a bad joke that was.

"You can trust me. We've been friends for half a decade! I delivered all your love letters to Penelope Clearwater!"

"I...yes, you did. I haven't forgotten. But this..."

"You know I wouldn't ask unless it was very, very important. Just tell me how they monitor the magic of individual witches and wizards. How they track...Dark Magic."

Those two words hung in the air like an anvil, and Hermione thought that she might choke on the lingering, _accusing_ silence.

She looked so serious, so profoundly mournful, that Percy was swayed to speech. Internally, he cursed his silly fondness for these swotty, curly-haired females- they were nothing but trouble. He should have learned that from Penny.

Summary: Snape is summoned to receive instructions from the Dark Lord pertaining to a potion that will permanently bind the soul to the body Voldemort inhabits, impeding the gradual deterioration of said body. When the party sent to retrieve Granger fails to return before midnight, Snape is dispatched to check on their progress. Meanwhile, Granger arrives in London and pays a visit to the apartment of Percy Weasley, where she decides to use one of the Death Eater's wands in place of her own and questions Percy about the methods the Ministry employs to monitor wizard's magic.

Note: 1. The potion means "to bind a soul" in Internet Latin. As much as I enjoy making embarrassing linguistic errors in a public forum, editing would be appreciated. 2. If you've noted a discrepancy with the wands, it is intentional.


	6. Rattles a Weakness

Disclaimer: id.

CH 6. Rattles a Weakness

Summarized at end.

Déjà vu.

It must have been something in the air, some lingering nuance of death, because he felt it before he saw the house. It settled about him, gentle, and then, like a sheet pulled tight with a sudden movement, it constricted, trapping him in the memory.

_The night was morbidly quiet as he moved through the underbrush at the periphery of the grounds, fueled by adrenaline and pure unadulterated panic. He had for some reason, apparated into the forest; he'd only been here once. He couldn't think, couldn't remember. He didn't know what he would do when he got there. It was probably the stupidest decision he had ever made. Well, second. The only thing that registered at the moment was the feeling that his soul was fleeing him, and he had to catch it, hold on, or perish._

Lights, frantic and blinding, pulled him back to awareness: there were muggle cars- he recognized them as ambulance, police, and firetruck- stationed along the narrow village lane. The corona surrounding the little assembly forced the surroundings further into obscurity, but he thought he could distinguish the lines of a house beyond.

Blanketed and huddled on the step of the sidewalk, a woman was making fervent gesticulations at a uniformed officer.

He could tell she was distressed without the signs of physical agitation; the intonation peculiar to hysteria was easy to recognize, even if the words were indistinct, lost beneath the abrasive wailing of sirens.

Now disillusioned, he edged closer to the conversation.

"What sort of noise was it, Mrs. Galbraith? Like an argument, or like a burglary?"

"Well, I'd hardly be likely to know, would I? One would think I made it a habit of inviting burglars into my home just to listen to the sounds they make!"

The man closed his eyes, evidently praying for patience.

"You said that you heard screaming. Could you tell who it was?"

Mrs. Galbraith opened her eyes wide, peering in to the distance, thinking.

"It was definitely a woman."

"Mrs. Granger, or Miss?"

So he had the right house after all, Snape thought. But what in the name of every deity he didn't believe in had happened? More importantly, where were Lestrange and her cronies?

"Well, Mrs, I would assume. That girl rarely comes home for the summer."

"She stays with relatives? Or friends?"

"I haven't the foggiest. Evelyn rarely speaks about her."

"Spoke."

"Excuse me?"

"Mrs. Granger is..." he paused, at a loss for an appropriate expression, "well...the house, clearly..."

"Don't dilly-dally about it, man, for heaven's sake! The Grangers, bless them, have departed from among the living."

The officer whispered, in an aside, to another: "How many have you got so far?"

"Five, sir. All in what looks to be the sitting room."

"Arson?"

"Improbable, sir. It appears to have been a gas leak."

"Damn! So much for the larceny theory. Alright, get me my thermos and tell me when forensics finishes up. Bloody waste of a Saturday night, I tell you."

Snape moved past the fluorescent aura, past the indomitable Mrs. Galbraith, towards the Granger house- if, indeed, a charred and gutted wreck could be called a house at all. Windows and door were gone from the eastern wall, but it remained standing, however precariously. The garden still glistened with the season's first roses: Allotrias, Snape classified, the characteristic shine faded under the falling ash. A_pt_, he thought as he stood beneath the taunting fall of moonlight, amidst the dying flowers. Last time, there had been just one.

_The house was dark, but that didn't mean anything, of course. He hoped. Wormtail, the mumbling moron, was probably lying through his pointy little teeth. Dumbledore had promised, and he'd had to take that- it was all he could get. He wished, in that moment, that he was a man who had faith; but, somewhere inside the untanglable mess of causality, he had felt the inevitability. _

_Inside, Potter. Lying face down in a pool of his own blood._

Inside, the smell of burnt flesh. Walls, stripped to the blackened plaster. Debris, human and otherwise.

_Upstairs. Rooms. More rooms, each empty. Maybe she'd managed to flee before the Dark Lord...maybe she was hiding...maybe. He cast the charm._

"Homenum revelio."

_Nothing._

Nothing.

* * *

He had his back turned to her. He was getting her coat, saying "I'm trusting you with this, you understand."

Did taking advantage of an easy shot make her an opportunist? A coward?

"_Obliviate."_

Did it?

* * *

"I need a room for the night."

She'd capitulated, after a whole minute of waiting for this man behind the counter, engrossed in some programme, to acknowledge her. His head pivoted toward her, gaze still glued to the miniature television enthroned atop a stack of yellowed newspapers- the briefest of pauses, and then reproachful eyes snapped to her face. They narrowed. A pudgy hand, bearing a single thick gold band, rose to slowly wipe the crumbs from a scowling mouth. He leaned towards her, shirt half-undone beer-stained, and extracted a clipboard and a pen, the end of which he slipped between his lips and bit, considering.

"Twenty."

Hermione bit back as sigh of relief: she was unrecognized. These by-the-hour places bespoke anonymity in every grimy floorboard, in every stained sheet; which meant, effectively, that no matter how many restless nights she'd spent in this sorry excuse of an hotel, this man forgot her face the second it was out of his line of sight. Although, she supposed that hers was a face the eyes slid over like something mundane, like a decaying park bench, or a slick of old gum on the sidewalk; neither pretty nor ugly enough to draw a second glance. She pulled out the bills- they were leathery soft- but hesitated in the offering. This battered wallet and the money in it were the only things of her mother's that she had now. She was about to retract the offer, when the man leaned over and yanked them out of her fingers. She, purely out of long-ingrained habit, said:

"Thanks."

He grimaced.

"Up the stairs. You'd better be out by 9 tomorrow."

_9 o'clock...ha! she'd be out in two hours if she could help it. _

'Don't worry, I have no intention of gracing your _fine_ _establishment_ any longer than absolutely necessary." For a second, the comment hovered just around the vicinity of haughtily sarcastic, but her voice trailed off at the end, and it tumbled gracelessly right on top of petulant, knocked it over, and went straight for abject and whiny.

Gods, she _really_ didn't want to be here. Unwelcome memories lurked at the edges of her perception, latching onto faint glimpses of a familiar stretch of wall, the disembodied chant of traffic, the way the light swam in the hallway.

In a fit of perversity, the fates had conspired to put her in the same room she'd taken three years ago, on an ill-conceived bid at escape. Two weeks of languishing in bed in a miserable stupor, eating packet after packet of crisps, lulled by the sounds of animalism that had carried through the walls. It was better than television, not that this hole had one. It never failed to make her nauseous, but she could never look away. She was the bystander to that car crash where the vehicles were human bodies, and impact happened over and over and over...

It was just like déjà vu; she could hear them grunting as the joining wall shook in rhythm with the unseen hotel bed which banged against it. She cast a nonverbal Transparency Charm - and if only Professor Snape could see her now with his "any dunderhead can memorize a textbook, _Miss_ Granger, but it takes some modicum of _character_ to properly execute a spell".

Suddenly, she saw Snape standing in the room with her, contemptuous brow raised saying; "Any dunderhead can be a _voyeur_, Miss Granger, but it takes _character_ to properly execute a Death Eater..."

And she felt like she was going to be sick and she could just bet that she wouldn't know character if it came up and Imperiused her.

Hermione blinked. There was no one in the room, and she was being absolutely silly.

Through the wall, she examined them.

Exhibit A: one balding, middle-aged man with overzealous sweat glands, a tacky Rolex, and a sizable paunch.

Exhibit B: one stilettoed twenty-something with a collar around her neck and the words "Too Hot" circumscribed by a pink heart with an arrow through it tattooed across her left bicep.

Exhibit C: crumpled bills on the bedside table next to a littered ashtray and a couple of shot glasses.

She didn't need to be a student of this dynamic to come to the right conclusion. It looked like he was a regular, though, since the woman had evidently bothered to offer him liquor pre-coitus. Hermione studied them minutely, dimly aware that she should be having _some_ response- but she felt nothing. A floating feeling, perhaps. Weightless and dead. Ah, so her emotions had finally gone the way of her much-regretted common sense, not to mention common decency. His thrusting movements jiggled his stomach fat in a most unbecoming manner, and he was staring down at the woman with a manic gleam, her ankles firmly in hand, jerking towards her torso with every stroke.

He pushed into her with an effort, with enough force to jerk her body a good five inches closer to the wall. She grunted as Hermione studied her face. Pink lipstick and pink eyeshadow stood out becomingly on her dark skin. She would look quite nice if not for the runny mascara streaking her face. Her hair was a fluorescent kind of blonde, blending to an inch of black hair at the scalp.

The woman reached a hand down to stimulate herself, and amazingly, it seemed to Hermione, she was soon moaning in...pleasure?

"Don't you come. Don't you dare fucking come. You don't deserve it, you teasing tart. You like being treated like this, don't you... you... dirty whore, you...you" He pulled her hand away, and held it above her head.

His ruddy cheeks puckered and a globule of spit flew from his mouth, shortly followed by two more. They landed on the woman's face, near her lips, to the right of her nose, and at the corner of her left eye, slowly sliding down her skin, leaving glistening trails.

"Bitch knows her place." He grunted. Inside the neighboring hotel room, the windows cracked. The bathroom mirror shattered.

"Yes sir." Unnoticed, the ashtray broke in half, sending the ashes afloat in lazy spirals.

"Oh,oh...oh... I'm gonna...I'm gonna..."he moaned.

Feeling her gorge rise, Hermione barely made it to the loo before she vomited for the second time that evening. There wasn't much- just tea and bile, and nevertheless she was letting the drool drip down her chin like a utter moron.

Kneeling by the toilet, she noticed the yellow rings inside the bowl, and then, the mold between the floor tiles and the broken mirror. _Ah, the glamorous life of Hermione Granger_, she thought as she performed a mental "scourgify/reparo" combination.

To business then. A shower was in order; to sanitize her body, at the least, even if it could not sanitize her mind. Then, she needed to come up with a brilliant plan, replete with airtight alibi, unwitting scapegoat, a seemingly off-the-cuff monologue of grief and sorrow appropriate to the occasion, and a backup plan in case the whole thing went arse over kettle, as things were wont to do. In short, the works. It was entirely probable that her mental faculties would prove unequal to the occasion; in that event, she supposed, she'd just have to settle for the old Gryffindor standby: dumb luck. It unsettled her, how grandly unprepared she was for this; it occurred to her to think of nothing but _make it seem as if it never happened..._

Trailing her hand along the floor where the porcelain fixtures met tile, she speared an abandoned spiderweb on her wand, studied the strands and, upon finding them acceptable, transfigured them into a metal flask. The film that played her memories paused and cut on the moment before her rude awakening tonight, and she carefully pulled out the sequence up until her arrival at the inn. With the precision of a surgeon, she bridged the dream of the swimming pool with the images of the surly receptionist so that it seemed she had been dreaming all along, that she had never woken up. This was not the first time she had performed a selective weeding of her memories, and it would likely not be the last.

Oh and wasn't that just simply_ brilliant_. Cleverest witch of her age, indeed. What age, she would've liked to know. Of the century? Of her generation? Her _year_? Lavender and Parkinson must be out of their pretty heads with indignation. Oh, and far be it for her to forget the ever astute Hannah Abbott and the incomparably ingenious Millicent Bulstrode.

The expunged memories were pulled into the flask for safekeeping and placed on top of her clothes as she undressed and stepped under the water, which, despite her ardent twisting of the red tap, never manged to run hotter than tepid. The cake of soap so generously provided had blossomed like a flower and dried into pale petals that crumbled at a touch. A hundred soiled bodies had left their stain on it, and now she had the disturbing suspicion that, instead of cleaning her, the soap was coating her in layers of filth. The water, warm and oily, made it worse. She gave the shower up as a bad job and scourgified herself, which felt rather like swiping sandpaper on skin, but left her feeling antiseptic. That only left...the plan.

Hermione Granger sighed; it was going to be a long night but, she now felt perversely justified in telling herself, there was no rest for the wicked.

* * *

Next door, Tania Sinn (real name: Tripta Sangameswar) eyed the crumpled twenties and deliberated on what she needed more at the moment: a sandwich or a heroin fix. The latter would be a problem, since her regular bloke, Neils, was deader than the sex she'd just had.

It had been _so fucking close_...another second in that phone booth- where the letch had graciously demanded payment of the 'helping hand' variety- and she would have gone the way of Divine, her partner in crime, of whom no more had been found beneath the rubble than one severed hand, its nail polish as flawless as if it had just been applied.

_First things first_, she thought, as she carefully levered herself from the bed and went to wash the semen out of her hair.

* * *

Simon Jessop never forgot a face. Names, addresses, telephone numbers, all the deciduous modifiers with which humanity branded its members, passed through his head like wayfaring birds, but he could tell you the eye color of every drifter that had ever darkened his doorway. It was a necessary skill in his line of business- a small-time bookmaking operation fronting as a rent-house of questionable standard- where persons shed pseudonyms as often as they did clothing.

He squinted at the register, where 'Dolores Umbridge' was printed in block capitals and turned his attention to two other rosters, extracted from a towering file cabinet which secured three decades of records. It would have been a needle-in-the-haystack endeavor if not for the subject; that girl had given him the creeps when he had seen her first, wafting through the room like a premonition of oblivion. Now, Jessop had encountered some queer species among the human flotsam that strayed past his dingy corner of the world and this one, for all her unremarkability, had lingered in the back of his mind like the aftertaste of contaminated water, unsettling less for the filth one could see than for the filth one could not.

One page, dated 5 August, 1994 proclaimed the author '_Minerva MacGon...._" the small, even script tapering off into a squiggle of illegibility and the other, from 26 June, 1995, contested with a _'Lily Potter_' in surly, resentful font that dominated not one, but two, ruled lines.

Curious, this progressively strident writing, and all- there was no doubt in his mind- belonging to the girl in unit D, whom to explain away he could concoct no plausible scenario of origin. Too orderly for a runaway, too homely for a whore, too contained for a lunatic, too feckless for a criminal. Too _normal_ to perturb him as much as she did. An ordinary man, perhaps, would have written off the inexplicable unease as a harmless lark; but Jessop fancied himself extraordinary, and- while this may or may not have been the case- was nonetheless gifted with a certain animal sense for the detection of danger, in deference to which he abandoned his papers and his telly to secure an ostentatious padlock on the latch of the door of unit D. In the morning, he would remove the fixture and escort Umbridge-Potter-MacSomething – forcibly, if need be- from the premises.

Ah, but perhaps this was overreaction? Or a certain species of paranoia that unfurls its ugly tentacles in the early hours and lends every mouse's scuttle, every shutter's swinging an eldritch air?

Certainly, it spoke of something odd that any of the mysterious guest's regular acquaintance would have laughed at the absurdity of her imprisonment, while her own parents would have understood only too well.

But, Mr. Jessop knew nothing of this, and would have believed not a word had anyone bothered to explain. Thus, feeling eminently self-satisfied, he ambled downstairs, where the pleasing drone of televised voices aired commentary on a football match, where his old dog lay peacefully beneath the desk, where life was as predictable as human weakness; in short, very.

Summary: Snape arrives at the ruin that was the Granger house; the sight triggers a flashback of the night of the Potters' murders. After Obliviating Percy, Granger rents a room at a muggle inn and begins to plan the cover-up of the incident with the Death Eaters. We discover that it is not the first time she has been to that particular establishment.

Note: 1. James Potter was murdered with the killing curse, but I have taken the liberty of assuming that the fall would have resulted in a head injury- hence the "pool of blood", perhaps more appropriately, a small puddle, but Snape's memory of the evening is clouded by emotion. 2. The byplay between the woman and her customer is plagiarized from life. Whose, I shan't say. 3. Neils (ch. 5) and Divine (Jean Genet, anyone?) are victims of the same Death Eater- manufactured subway explosion.


	7. A Crooked Pin

Disclaimer: id.

CH 7. A Crooked Pin

Summarized at end.

A sick disconnect. Pushing into a space where there was no entrance...

Severus had always imagined that he _was_ his mind- the body an incorporeal adjunct. In that instant he regretted the fact that the primary effectiveness of Occlumency was in denying initial access to the conscious, but, once the Legelimens had broken -or been allowed- through, it was a sort of frantic scrambling, running breathless one step ahead of a black tide. Obstacles hastily thrown in the way, meaningless memories, folded like cheap cardboard with the impact.

At longest last, the Dark Lord alighted upon his memory of the Granger house. Over and over, He stretched and flexed it, this way and that, every angle, every direction.

And just as suddenly, the memory was indolently discarded.

"Sssssso," Voldemort hissed.

And how _dearly_ he would have loved to say '_so what'_. But then again: _the famous last words of Potions Master, Death Eater, and professional turncoat Severus Snape, uttered before meeting an undignified end which left no body parts larger than one cubic inch were, quite uncharacteristically, 'So What'. The funeral was attended by no-one._

Snape could nearly _taste_ the rage, and was painfully grateful that, this once, he hadn't actually done anything wrong. He hadn't done anything _right_ either, but that was a problem to mull over later, in the gloomy morning midst of a whiskey bender.

Voldemort pried the sleeve off the flaking skin of his left arm, upon which pale appendage the maiden Mark sprawled in macabre repose. When the summons yielded naught but an icy draft, the blood-curdling shriek the Dark Lord emitted sent his servant crouching on the other side of the desk. In a pitch-black cubicle room somewhere in Surrey, Harry Potter twitched in tangled sheets and whimpered in his sleep.

Snape's working hypothesis was that Dolohov had planted the five corpses in the house (Granger, the parents, and the Lestranges) and proceeded to make a run for it, effectively faking his own death in a raging inferno. A botched fiendfyre probably. It was actually rather clever, for a man who was the intellectual rival of a small rodent. The fact that a _priori _spell woven through the air revealed the trace of Class A Restricted Magic supported this deduction; of course, the Unforgivables, Summonings and Blood Rituals would have left the same atmospheric imprint- but, then, why the burnt house?

Obviously, this theory did not go over well with the Master. At the very least, His sputtering tirade was an improvement from earlier when the Dark Lord had insisted- painfully- that Snape was responsible for the entire debacle.

It must have been a heretofore-suppressed subconscious death wish that forced the words out of his mouth: "Karkaroff is the one who recruited him; they were probably in league together. Treacherous bastards all, those damned Russians. No sense of loyalty."

His Lordship broke his seething monologue to glare at Snape, still crouched where he had fallen.

"Ah, but four of my servants were assigned to execute this mission."

"Perhaps the other one is on the run with Dolohov."

"Perhaps a certain treacherous snakelet informed the Order."

"Please, My Lord-" Snape was perfectly prepared to grovel, having less self-respect than could fit in a house-elf thimble.

"SILENCE!" The creature paced, dragging his rotten aura around the room like a toxic cloud.

"I will not go so far as to say the idea has merit, for that would be a gross overstatement, but there is a possibility. You claim that you did not betray me tonight. Prove it, Snape. Discover the guilty party, or I shall be forced to assume you culpable."

"Yes My Lord." If he listened closely, he could nearly hear the bell's insistent toll.

"Now get out of my sight."

He didn't need to be told twice. Or once, for that matter; only the desire to retain possession of all appendages- and, to be fair, a certain conceit about the grace of his bearing- prevented him from sprinting for the door.

Snape apparated just east of the gaping hole on his porch where the boards had caved to age and a termite infestation, so long overdue for repair that it had become a native feature of Spinner's End in all its glorious decrepitude. But there were muggles he could call to sort out the termites. Maybe they could take care of his problem with the rats too.

Just as Snape stood contemplating the patch of dirt, teeming with utterly useless flora, revealed by the aperture, Wormtail cracked the door, stood silhouetted against the unforgiving glare of the light within, a toothpick between his tiny teeth, picking...picking away at bits, one is reluctant to admit, most likely scrounged from the refuse and filth of the municipal dump.

"Well, speak of the devil."

"What?" Wormtail whined. But no answer was forthcoming.

"Where have you been? Its nearly three!" Still, he picked, picked away at the tiny remnants, scratching, poking...and finally, when he had extracted his hard-won prize, he studied it before licking it off the toothpick.

For fuck's sake, Snape thought. The parasite was giving him flashbacks of his damned _mother_ standing in the same place with the same angry question, which was utterly inexcusable and beyond a saint's toleration, really, considering his infernal migraine. Snape shoved the door, which shoved the man, who landed in a dirty heap on the dirtier floor.

"None of your bloody business." A snarl. Had he dared to say that to Eileen...hell, he'd gotten smacked around for saying "Out."

Wormtail put his garb in order- as much order as was possible with Weasley rejects- and glared at Snape, who was wearing a slightly frightening grin of...nostalgia?

"Just you watch it, Snape. I give my report to the Dark Lord tomorrow. I'm _sure_ you want it to be favorable." Still, he kept _picking, picking away._ Pettigew _so_ enjoyed holding the whip hand over the Greasy Git in this manner.

"What I _want,_rat, is to feed your filthy hide to that flea-bitten stray that roams around here. It's starting to look a bit peckish."

Nostrils flared, voice oozing honey, Wormtail said: "What, you went whoring and were a sickle short? Or is it that even _they_ wouldn't have you? Eh, _Snivellus?"_

This was the last straw.

"_Petrificus Totalus!"_ Snape barked and Pettigrew went rigid before he could unsheathe his wand and fell flat on his face- the maltreated toothpick tumbled underneath the cupboard near the fireplace, never to be seen again. Flipping Wormtail over with his boot, Snape saw that the fall had broken his nose. It would have to be fixed, of course, but all that could wait 'til the merciless morning. From experience he knew that broken noses, left unattended, would bleed no more that a half-hour before caking dry. On a whim, Snape kicked the supine man in the gut, and twice in the jaw for good measure. How he had longed to do this very thing, but the cretin was just another axe hanging over his head, watching his every move, watching for Snape to slip up, to fail...Now there was nothing the creature could say to the Dark Lord that could make Snape's situation any worse. And that was an oddly uplifting thought.

The wards with which Snape barricaded himself in the basement were only good for deterring things with a heartbeat, though. For there, hovering disapprovingly near his desk, getting her plasma all over his papers, was the ghost of Eileen Snape.

She hovered towards him in accusation: "Filthy boy. Look at the way you keep yourself. I will not have a disgrace for a son." Through her translucently hideous house coat, Severus could see his decayed potion letting off steam.

He had not yet managed to confine her to the Upstairs, but it wasn't for lack of trying. Trying which (he would admit to no one) had spanned decades, for he had known her as a ghost for longer than he had known her as a living woman.

"Go away. I have an experiment." He heard himself say the words in echo from countless years in which she lingered in the ethereal limbo of a life, unresolved. A life, wasted. It disconcerted him that he looked older than she did now; that, at his age, she had already been long dead. She could have been his sister, his twin, with her skulking gait, with limp black hair, with a nose that dominated a sallow, unprepossessing face.

"Experiment! Fiddling around with animal bits and cooking pots, more like." She drifted through his workbench, making a few glass vials on the counter top grow frost flowers, and he flinched, practically dropping his wand in his haste to cast warming charms on the fragile ingredients, lest they be ruined by the sudden drop in temperature.

Finished, he turned back to _the woman_, and snarled_: _"Go to hell."

And he meant it: she ought to be where she belonged, instead of here, inflicting upon him her insufferable presence... tormenting him with that shrill voice that pounded against his aching head like a hundred tiny mallets, reminding him...reminding him of...

He did _not_ want to be reminded.

"A son of mine should be A Somebody. A Department Head, an Auror, at the very least. And what does he do? He becomes a _teacher_! In _Potions_, of all useless things."

"Need I remind you that Tobias was a _mechanic?_ And you were a _shopgirl_."

Within the silence that followed, Snape unwittingly recalled similar scenes from childhood in which he had dared to talk back, knowing that punishment was imminent. His heart beat like a trapped hummingbird within his chest, but...she was dead, mercifully dead. She could do nothing. All she had were words, and for those he had long ago developed an immunity.

"You ungrateful wretch! Your father and I worked ourselves to _death_ to provide for you-"

"The only thing Tobias worked for was his next bottle of booze."

"_You_ drove him to it."

"Yes. How _convenient_."

"Your Father _may_ have had his flaws," Severus snorted, "but he _loved_ you, and he deserves your respect."

_He _loved _you and he deserves your respect. _

_He loved you and...and..._

_He loved..._

Snape felt sick.

He couldn't stand the _sight _of her for one second longer. Eileen was still gibbering something, though it could not penetrate the ringing in his ears.

"Depulso Ventus" he said, precise and quiet. A witness would have been unsettled by the pure loathing in his voice. As it were, Snape's visitors were mercifully scarce and his closest neighbor, who made her living by renting leisure boats to the _very_ occasional tourist, was two miles upstream. The spell created a blast of wind the force of which picked up the luckless ghost and carried her across the basement and through the wall on the opposite side.

Snape ran his hand across his overheated face. That would get rid of her for at least an hour.

The realization that the adrenalin was the only thing holding him up did not come until the chemical rush had dissipated; the crash sent him stumbling...he caught himself -barely- on the edge of the worktable as his vision blurred. Spasms of aftershocks thundered through him, twisting his insides... he would vomit any second...no he couldn't, because, with the bezoar gone, he would relapse with no one conscious in the vicinity to help him.

Gods. He needed a drink.

Snape grabbed the bottle he'd opened earlier around the neck with an unsteady motion and took a long swig. From a certain perspective, things were looking up, he thought. Four Death Eaters were out of the picture, two permanently. A fifth, namely himself, would be dead shortly. Who could argue that fewer trigger-happy murderers roaming about was a bad thing? They would, of course, bemoan the loss of Hermione Granger, who, after all, had had a promising future as a Ministry bureaucrat of the worst sort to look forward to; the kind who constantly looked to others for guidance; who were content to squander whatever meager talents they possessed on somebody else's vision, lacking their own; who, despite a veritable torrent of self-righteous peroration, were too craven to dare upset the status-quo.

Crawling behind his eyes were images of the charred, gutted corpses in the Granger house, the endless, endless muggle corpses of the last months, as useless as broken furniture littering his head like they littered alleyways, stations, and living rooms. He wanted to claw his eyes out, to unsee everything, to fade into sweet oblivion. More than anything, he wanted it to _end_. But only the dead saw the end of war- and he would soon be joining that happy multitude. Oh, he would search for Dolohov- maybe even find him- he would make the potion, he would spy, he would kill whomever they told him to kill, he would protect Potter, prolonging his life for a day, for a week.

Snape was well aware that both Voldemort and Dumbledore wanted him dead. Neither could trust him, and the fact that he was glued to the fence precluded him being useful to either. Of course, Albus would never take action himself, but was not above sacrificing Snape for the Greater Good if it became convenient to do so.

No conscious thought animated his hands as they went through the motions of decanting a measure of his ruined brew into a beaker, voiding the mercifully intact cauldron and dumping it, along with scalpels, forceps, pestles and various other implements contaminated by the process into a sunken vat of sanitizing fluid where they would languish in quarantine for twenty four hours before resuming utility.

A muttered _"Lumos mucro"_ produced a light beam of high intensity and fine precision that illuminated every shred of unincorporated ingredient in the muddy slop within the beaker. On a clipboard levitating near the talc counter top, Snape noted the acidity, the temperature and the consistency. The ruined potion was labeled, lidded, and stored away. The procedure would need to be started again, from the very first distillation; three weeks had been wasted in the last three hours, and for what? Despite a seething rage for Voldemort, Albus, and the whole untenable situation, when Snape removed a clean alembic from the supply closet, it was with gentle hands. Motions perfected by decades of practice assembled the distillation apparatus, lingering, adjusting, caressing the smooth glass fixtures perhaps a bit longer than strictly necessary. Not a mote of dust marred the surface of the alembic; it was pristine, like every other piece of equipment in his personal laboratory. It was the only kept place in his house; the only pure part of an ubiquitously disorderly existence. It was the only thing that brought him any peace.

Stepping out of the Cage (a highly sophisticated ward that hung like a bubble around the lab area and kept the temperature, humidity, and air pressure at the desired level), Snape began to unbutton his robes. There were three clasps on the collar, and the last one could be undone only with a nonverbal _"Libera", _a precaution undertaken to deter his _colleagues_ from undressing him without his consent, so that their hexes were unhindered by the numerous layers of thick wool. The third clasp undone made it possible to release the other buttons, and soon he was gingerly pulling the garment off of his aching back. He shook off the ash from earlier and noticed that the sulphurous stench lingered on the cloth.

"Scourgify." Muddy stains disappeared from the hem, but the stench still lingered.

"Scourgify! SCOURGIFY! Damn it!" There was no change.

He threw the robe on the floor in frustration.

"Incendio." Smiling satisfied as the robe disintegrated in a blaze of flame, Snape vanished the mess, leaving only a charred spot on the concrete as evidence. Now the room smelled like burnt wool, which was a significant improvement.

Tomorrow morning – well, today, since it was nearing 4 AM- some intern Auror would begin the enviable task of indexing the remains. The Order meeting scheduled for ten, for which he had prepared a speech gratuitously padded with anecdotes to make it seem as if he were giving more information than he actually had, would be turned into a circus of accusations. Grievances would be aired. Poles, greased. Backs, stabbed. They (read Moody) would insist that he must have known about the attack beforehand, which of course he had, but he would deny it and counter with a claim that the Dark Lord distrusted him- because he could provide little information since the Order barred him from the important meetings. And the truth? Well, that was a foreign language, maybe a foreign country, for a Slytherin. Or was it rather like a terminal disease?

Thus: "Oh, sure, I saw them. Right before they left. In fact I practically told them that the house would be unprotected; would have sent a message, but I got a bit distracted. No hard feelings, eh?"

Half those people wouldn't save him if he was drowning, never mind give him the benefit of the doubt. And the other half would charm a boulder around his neck.

Not as if he cared, or would hesitate to return the favor. Well, perhaps not Molly Weasley. That woman managed the incredible feat of being a tolerably decent person rid of that overbearing hypocrisy which seemed a staple of the Gryffindor disposition. The children were, of course, hopeless. Good for little but to become meat for the slaughter in the war. Hardly a loss.

He unrolled the scrolls and was dryly unsurprised to find that Voldemort's handwriting was worse than Longbottom's.

Work, then. His life's work. Merchandising complicated concepts into ABC syllabi and mnemonic devices, shoving these rudimentary parcels down the throats of beastly, brainless, and disinterested children, pouring all of his talent and skill into the accomplishment of one Master's schemes, while simultaneously pouring more still into their hindrance. In short, an exercise in futility leading gradually but irrevocably towards the final judgment, the eternal night.

What was it He had said? "_I must have full function of my body." _Was the puppeteer's cadaver being rebellious?Did that imply that the Dark Lord was functioning at decreased capacity? His Cruciatus certainly hurt as much as ever. But, if true, this was expensive information. Perhaps DADA position expensive. Or, at least, pay raise expensive. And he would be damned if he didn't bleed every drop of opportunity out of it, but to come forward now would be premature. Albus would be much more_ grateful_ to be presented with a well-realized theory backed by hard facts like whether or not the potion was a feasible solution. Whether it was possible to alter it to produce the opposite effect to the one intended. Moreover, this gambit would have the pleasant collateral effect of securing his life for a good three months or so while he carried out 'research'.

He looked at the analogue on the wall. 4:35.

Putting off the work was eminently preferable to slogging through it tonight, since he had no set deadline and since the memory of that night- the night that his life was completely shattered- refused to be ignored.

Sirius Black had shown up on his ridiculous motorcycle just as he was about to disapparate away with her body. Instead, he had kissed her for the very first time as the brat wailed in his crib across the room, as the mongrel's footsteps ascended the staircase, as his tears fell and rolled off her quickly cooling cheeks.

He was a desperate longing, nothing more. A longing for...for...

For the briefest of moments pure faith had sung within him- in the splendour of her spirit, in the coulour of her hair- sung a joy much greater than all the brutality and the indifference. For the briefest of moments, he had dared to hope. But it was too much, too extreme. He had hardened himself to receive a thousand small pains, in succession, limited, articulated, knowable. But this, her, him _with_ her, was terrifying. It transcended all of his life; it was like death: absolute, vast, unspeakable. He was afraid. He wanted to survive. He knew how to do that. That was what he knew how to do.

So he had survived. His heart was still beating sixteen years later. But what more could he say about it? He slept, ate, fucked, sometimes, acted, reacted, got fucked over, often. What more could he say?

A parchment tacked to the wall, sloppy in a drunken scrawl and a bit faded from age, read: _God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference._

Why was that damn nonsense still up?

"Fuck. _Fuck_."

Reaching under the bed, he took out another bottle, careful not to drop it. Uncapping it, he drank until the whiskey topped off his mouth and he had to swallow quickly to stop it dribbling out of the sides. So it went, on and on, deeper and deeper into a meditative disintegration, until the edges of everything were also the edges of everything else, and he was a sort of center for a mad slow-spinning tornado. He supposed he should go to sleep, and standing up, attempted to remove his boots. It was a foolish miscalculation. And so, trapped like a specter in a fog, between the beautiful and the absurd, the sublime and the disgusting- and which was which, in all verity?- Severus Snape witnessed the floor give way beneath his feet.

* * *

Okay, Granger. Deep breath. Remember your lines.

The walk across the park seemed to take forever.

_It never happened._

She clutched the wand- it now looked exactly like hers- in icy fingers, painfully aware of someone's eyes on her back. Who the hell was it and why were they staring at her? _Oh, just a Muggle. Breathe. Idiot girl. _Pathetic, she was. Put Fletcher, the two-bit crook, to shame. He at least had the decency to be straight about it.

And this was impossible, too; she really didn't have the finesse to bury all emotion while acting convincingly hysterical- assuming she could bury all emotion at this point, and that was assuming a lot. But failure was _not _an option. And maybe that had been the problem all along, and she just kept jumping fences like a show pony with an unrelenting whip at her back.

Hermione apparated across the street, and with a deep, shaky breath, opened the door.

The screaming portrait, while useful as a bit of security apparatus, did nothing for her frayed nerves. She sunk to her knees on the rug and yelled for help.

In the kitchen, Molly Weasley dropped the coffee pot into the sink. Remus Lupin tossed his newspaper as he rushed to the source of the wail. He found an obviously distraught Hermione Granger slumped on the floor, covering her ears beneath a litany of curses from the painted harpy.

_Mudblood...mudblood...mudblood..._

It was the voice of Mrs. Black, but also the voice of Draco Malfoy, and the Death Eaters from last night, and her own taunting voice crooning _nothing but a mudblood..._

Molly got to her first.

"Come to the kitchen dear."

Hermione looked up at her. She opened her mouth several times, and, after three attempts, said: "Mrs. Weasley, its...my parents."

"Your parents? What happened?" Hermione flinched at the sound of Remus' voice; everything was in technicolor, sounds were too loud, the wafting smell of breakfast was churning her stomach.

"I...oh gods...I came home this m-morning and t-the house... it was com-completely..."

Molly's face drained of color. A sinking dread settled heavy in her gut.

She asked: "Completely what?"

Hermione didn't know what to do with her hands. They were skittering around the carpet, making her look nervous. She buried her head in them. _It never happened._

Through the pitiful barrier of her fingers, she whispered: "Burnt. There was nothing there. They're not there."

"Oh Merlin." Remus said. "Oh Merlin."

Oh Merlin was just about spot on and she was a mincing little _coward._..

Molly glanced up, conveying the fact that she was delegating the task of telling the Headmaster to him. Wide-eyed, he nodded and left.

Molly tugged the girl into a standing position and half-pulled, half-pushed her to the kitchen.

"Now, now dear. This does not necessarily mean anything has happened. Albus will sort this out. Try not to panic. Would you like a bit to eat? Egg? Toast? Tea?"

Molly wrung her hands in the folds of her apron, watching Hermione study the grain of the tabletop.

"J-just tea. Thank you, Mrs. Weasley." Hermione doubted that she could hold anything down, though by all accounts she should be ravenous. When had she eaten last? Yesterday? The day before? The gears in her head were working furiously. Molly said Headmaster. Which meant that Dumbledore would show up which was really bad because he knew everything and she couldn't lie to him which meant that she couldn't be here when he came or maybe she could be unconscious or sleeping which would work if she told Molly first and then Molly told the Headmaster and she started to panic and they had to give her a sedative.

"I thought I'd just go see my grandparents for this weekend, because I know, with everything that's going on, I won't be able to see them for a long time...and when I Apparated home this morning...it was just awful, and then I came here, and...oh no...Mrs. Weasley what if they're..."

Molly watched as the girl took long, shuddering breaths, muttering to herself, clutching at her head. She summoned a Calming Draught, and the girl looked up at her with anguished eyes. Hermione's fingers shook so much they nearly dropped the vial. She stole a glance at the Mrs. Weasley, taking in every nuance. One wrong move, one wrong gesture, one fleeting _expression _could upset the delicate construct, and Hermione knew that once the spool of her lies began to unravel, it would spin right off. But that wouldn't happen: when she planned her moves down to the smallest details, the lies were seamless enough to fool a pro. Still blood, life, rushed in her ears in defiance of her shame.

"I don't feel well, Mrs. Weasley."

"_Of course_ you don't! Here, drink this. Now, go upstairs and have a lie-down." Molly, bless her bleeding heart, was giving her an out."Try to get a little rest- here, take a Dreamless Sleep- I'll call you down when there is news."

So: there would be a meeting. Tonks would be there, offering condolences to the killer of her own blood, however loathed. Ron and Ginny would smother her with kindness. Harry would throw a tantrum. The Order would gather, whisper, and disperse like a swarm of flies carried on a gust of wind. Too little too late, as usual. Unavailable, indisposed, indifferent on the Trio's deadly escapades-only to reappear ex post facto with indulgent back pats and gentle scoldings. She had lost faith- and that was the very crux of the reason she always capitulated to Harry's coaxing in the end- it seemed that if they didn't do it, no one would.

But _this_ was no noble cause, no heroic quest. _This –_ she would not dignify it with a name- was sickeningly _petty, _just like everything else about The Great Hermione Granger. And she never did have any guts at all, begging after Harry and Ron for tiny scraps of attention like some pathetic puppy and then using the two of them to hide behind. Who did she think she was, running around as if she had a half-shot at a chance?

But, _stay or leave_? She couldn't decide. Across the room from where she sat hunched on the folding cot, Ginny's bed stood neatly arranged with a hallmark Weasley blanket, woolen red and threadbare. One of her stuffed bears was propped against the dune of the covered pillow, eying the great beyond obliquely with one two-hole button and one glass eye. Not Mr. Mott, the dingy sock-bear and Gin's favorite, but some luckless castaway abandoned to the tender mercies of Grimmauld's moulding airs to mark the place where Ginny had laid her vibrant head. Feeling like an intruder, Hermione moved carefully across the floor, flinching every time a floorboard cried its protest. Sterile light guttered down into the narrow alley between 12 and 13 (of which naught could be seen but an expanse of decaying wall) and drew the lines of a mutilated desktop, upon which stood a fractured inkwell and a jam jar of dead gnats, the favored treat of Arnold the Pygmy Puff. Hermione picked up the bear and, turning it over, read the cloth tag sown onto its backside.

"Spelvin, is it?" She asked the bear, who remained stubbornly mute.

Undeterred, she continued:

"Well, it's a pleasure to make your acquaintance, kind sir. Hermione Granger, at your service."

Carefully, she replaced the bear in exact position, and, stepping back, bowed low in his general direction, but this movement put her in the perfect vantage to notice the mark her footprints had left on the dust-layered floor. Inexplicably, the trail of dust shoes filled Hermione with dread and an urgent desire to hide the evidence of her presence.

A mental _"Tergeo pulvis" _banished the dust, but left the grime intact.

"Ought I or oughtn't I? What says thou, Sir Spelvin?"

Sir Spelvin said exactly nothing, but his presence seemed to imply a certain hostility nonetheless.

Suddenly, she couldn't look at him, or at the faded "Hail the Harpies" poster, or at anything in particular at all. Turning towards the wallpaper (a rather grotesque Morris variety), Hermione tried to focus on the stationary pattern...but the flowered designs began to move and shift and spin, the room was dizzying, her legs were boneless, and the floor was rising...rising to meet her...

But all this was hardly worse than the creatures eating away at her insides, or the burning fever which begat only cold sweat...

_The potion! _was the only though Hermione's brain produced, and her shaking hands were digging, frantically digging through her knapsack, the stupid bottomless knapsack that she had gloated over...

"Accio...accio...dammit..."

The handle of the potion box came into her hand, aided my magic or luck, but when she opened the lid, all the little vials looked exactly the same, and she hadn't bothered to put everything back in alphabetical order when she took out the healing supplies.

Brown spheres, ringed with burning orange, were crowding the panorama, and since when did she write like an overexcited three year old? Finally, she found the right label, but uncapping the tiny stopper with her sluggish fingers was an ordeal in itself.

It gave with much persuasion, and then the bitter potion was burning her throat at the same time as it sent a wave of eerie calm through her, leaving the extremities a little numb but accomplishing exactly what it was brewed to accomplish.

Now, one may assume that an agitation of this nature was reserved only for dire circumstances very much like those Hermione found herself in at present (and she would have encouraged the notion) but this was far from being the case. No, Hermione's panic attacks predated the incident currently under observation by a good nine years; they predated even her enrollment at Hogwarts, predated Harry Potter and all the hazard he signified. It was, in fact, an affliction born within the walls of the St. Dymphna Center of Behavioral and Psychiatric Health, which establishment would remain unknown to the wizarding populace until the publication of Rita Skeeter's strident biography of the Muggleborn witch. But all that was ancient history, Hermione would have insisted had she been asked, and there was absolutely no need to burden others with the like, never mind that she preferred never to recall those years if it could be helped at all.

But in the summer of 1997, Hermione Granger paced the floor of Order Headquarters, leaving no footprints, and thought:

_This is a bad idea. A really bad idea. This was probably the most idiotic thing she had ever done, and that included Polyjuicing herself into a cat. _

A puerile, shoddy, hare-brained, reckless, over-confident, _stupid_ idea.

Summary: Severus Snape returns to Spinner's End after Voldemort demands he find the party responsible for the failure with the Grangers, or be presumed the perpetrator, and has an argument with Wormtail. Attempting to resume his potions project, he is accosted by his mother, a ghost haunting the house, whom he banishes temporarily in a fit of pique. He then proceeds to drink himself into unconsciousness while reminiscing about Lily Evans. Granger shows up at Headquarters where she tells Molly Weasley that she arrived that morning to find her home burnt and her parent's missing. Remus Lupin leaves to inform the Headmaster while Granger makes plans to pretend ignorance to the rest of the Order.

Note: 1. St. Dymphna- patron saint of mental illness and asylums. She was beheaded by her father after she refused to marry him to take the place of her dead mother. (The father went apparently insane after his wife died, and, when no lady that resembled her could be found to become his new wife, the man turned on his daughter with lecherous intent.) 2. I do feel completely justified in making snide jibes against the Russian characters, being thusly descended myself. Perhaps you could already tell that English is not my first or, indeed, second, language.


	8. My Buried Life

Disclaimer: id.

CH 8. My Buried Life

Summarized at end.

_He dreamt:_

Prowling the halls with a whirling shield of wards around him- to detect the Basilisk at fifty yards, giving him enough time to run for cover- Snape made his way to the Hospital Ward as quickly as his feet would carry him. Still, he was practically crawling along- had he always walked that slow? At long last, the double doors came into view around the corner. Goal in sight, an unreasonable fear gripped him that he would be struck down just as he reached for the door. Eaten alive. Or Petrified, leaving no one capable of making the brew which would liberate the others. But no, his hand was on the door...twisting the handle, slowly....and he was in. The wood slid to behind him with a loud croak.

Now, all he needed to do was retrieve a blood sample from one of the victims (of their of own stupidity) and return to the lab unmolested.

There they lay: Creevey, Finch-Fletchley, Clearwater...and Granger.

A malicious glee budded within him as he zeroed in on the last, dear friend of Harry St. Potter and bane of his classroom. Stupid girl. He wouldn't regret loosing her to permanent Petrification; after all, the stone body could only sustain its chemical processes for so long before it began to die away. Extracting a butterfly needle and a glass beaker, he approached the insensate student. Attired in full formal dress as she was, procuring access to her inner arm would be more trouble that it was worth. In compromise, he grasped her by the ankle and turned her leg so as to allow easy access to the vein which curled about the inside of her knee. One antiseptic charm later, he pulled the icy skin taut with two fingers and inserted the needle into her bloodstream. Slowly, the blood began to ooze into the container. Within the moonlit gloom of the hospital wing, it looked as black and viscous as tar.

Milliliter after milliliter, he watched the tube fill, utterly absorbed with the slow obscene rise of the fluid, shamelessly intimate as it now seemed.

The shudder of a breath surprised him; he looked up and saw that the girl had turned her head toward him, neck bent at an unnatural angle as if it had been snapped, and regarded him now with a terrible gaze, eyes brilliant lucid crimson.

In gut-wrenching horror, he stumbled away from her, tripping over the hem of his teaching robes and landing gracelessly on the sterile white tile. She, the monstrous menacing thing, rose slowly from her cot and drew closer towards him with jerky movements, as if the nerve synapses in her body were rebelling all at once.

Closer, it came, appraising him as if it would sweep down and rip out his throat.

He screamed, and woke screaming.

* * *

"What's your professional opinion?"'

In the placid light of morning, two figures stumbled through a burnt ruin, examining the damage.

"What's yours?"

One, the pink-haired, weaved a spell which shot through the air like a green firework and settled over the floor in patches.

"I've been off field duty for a while, Tonks."

The other, tall and blue-clad, performed the standard magic signature charms, revealing a spectrum from the mundane to the highly illegal.

"You make it sound like that's a bad thing."

"Come now, I don't imagine you would find politics and paperwork all that exciting when you could be out here chasing villains." He walked through a standing doorway framed by nothing to examine the charred porcelain sink in the other room, once a kitchen perhaps, though it was now impossible to tell.

"Maybe, but I'm not a-Minister-in-waiting, King." She grinned briefly before returning to a more thorough examination of the spelled green pattern on the ground.

"Yet," wafted from the other room.

She laughed.

"Hardly. I really can't stand the smarmy stuff. Give me a good murder case any day."

She circled one human-shaped green outline, and called out: "Hey Shaklebolt, come look at this."

When he was standing beside her, she pointed down at the outline.

"See, this one is mostly intact, like he fell where he stood. But that one," she pointed to a scattering of green around a few larger shapes,"don't exactly look like he went peacefully."

Shaklebolt approached the haphazard remains, and knelt down. "Dismemberment. Look, that's the head."

He pointed to an oval patch of green a few feet away. "And what about the one by the door?"

As she made her way towards the odd pattern, attempting to step over various debris, the toe of her boot snubbed on a black mass, and she tripped before managing to right herself at the last moment.

Shaklebolt smiled. "Hopeless."

"Oh, bugger _off." _

Studying the impression, she pronounced at last:

"Dead before the big fire, obviously, maybe with some sort of flesh dissolving spell. Like he_ melted_, or something. What d'you reckon?"

"Burnt perhaps, the first time independently, then with the rest."

An eyebrow quirked, a pink dash on a pale face.

"Excessive."

"The trace is showing Class A Restricted. Fiendfyre would have leveled the place, unless it was done by an amateur. More likely Unforgivables. Unregistered, obviously, or this place would have been crawling with Ministry minions by now."

"It is," Tonks said, considering him with a self-deprecating quirk to her lip.

She pointed up at the ceiling, through the gaps in which the sunlit sky was visible.

"No Dark Mark."

"Maybe they let a rookie cast it and it disappeared in the night."

"Merlin. I really don't want to think about the fact that they've got_ rookies._ Bloody_ kids, _in this mess_. _But there it is, I suppose."

"When did Hermione Granger get here?"

"800."

"So, between 2000, when it got dark, and 2400, when the muggles arrived." Standing, he dusted off the front of his navy robes, and continued: "Albus said to keep this quiet."

Tonks raised her hands as if in self defense.

"Oi, don't look at _me_. _You're_ the one who wrote his thesis on Muggle Camouflage."

Sighing, he asked: "You'll finish up here?"

She nodded, watching him depart to carry out the unpleasant task of Obliviating a dozen or so hapless Muggles, which left her the more unpleasant task of destroying the evidence. Lacking a spectator, her upbeat demeanor faded into the morose silence within the skeleton of somebody's ruined life. It was a near impossible task to maintain a congenial view of humanity when in the course of one's daily life one was incessantly assaulted with a hundred unassailable proofs of man's senseless, brutal, animal cruelty.

But it got better with time and experience. As a trainee she used to cry herself to sleep every night. Now, a bunch of dismembered and burnt corpses in the house of one of her acquaintances caused her a minute of melancholic contemplation, nothing more. Thus, she began.

* * *

Light cut through the opaque glass panes on the laundry room door and landed in square patterns on the concrete wall across. This little cell of a room, adjacent to the garage and beneath the rest of the house, was an immaculate testament to the priorities of one Petunia Dursley. It held two gleaming white appliances, an oversized cupboard, and a metal counter. A myriad of cleaning products, alphabetically ordered and spaced exactly five centimeters apart, lined the shelves that covered an entire wall. One burnished iron stood like a trophy in the very center of the table. It was Sunday. For most of the residents of Little Whinging, this implied church service and late breakfast; but for Petunia, who anticipated its coming all week, Sunday was Laundry Day. Ever since she was a child in her mother's well-kept house, she had loved this ritual of cleansing, literal and symbolic. The sound of the humming dryer, the feel of clean sweaters and socks between her fingers, the crisp smell of detergent; these were the sensory pleasures the rest of her life denied her, combined in one blissful afternoon. She felt the absence of these things acutely as she lay in bed that morning, feverish and ill after having succumbed to a strain of summer flu. Against her will, she had capitulated to practicality (with ill grace) and ordered her nephew, Harry Potter, to carry out her special task.

Mid-morning found Harry scowling at a giant pair of graying underpants as he attached them to the clothesline with wooden pins. Only two weeks at the Dursleys, and he was ready to give his broom-servicing kit for a quick escape. But it wasn't as if he had anywhere else to go, Harry thought miserably. Sirius was, after all, dead. Had been dead for a year now. He remembered Dumbledore's words bitterly: "_Sirius would have wanted you to be happy, Harry. He would have wanted you to live your life to its fullest potential. Give it time." _

Time. He didn't have any of that. All he had was a horrid family, dead parents, and a damned _obligation _to martyr himself for the sake of everyone else. A little voice told him that this wasn't true, exactly; he had Hermione and Ron and Hagrid. He had Quiddich and Hogwarts. But Harry wasn't in the mood to be reasonable; he wanted to savor his anger, because the anger made him feel a little less powerless.

Wasn't he supposed to be better now? Dumbledore said "time" like it was a bottle of Pepper-up Potion. And he hadn't done anything stupid in months. Not like last summer, when he had run away from the Dursleys' and taken the Knight Bus to the Ministry, breaking into the Department of Mysteries. He had some half-conceived plan about going into the Arch after Sirius, he remembered. As he stood in front of the veil, wand in hand, he could swear that he heard his godfather's voice call him. But Mr. Weasley had rushed in just then, panting and red- faced and taken Harry back to his aunt's house where the Order put him under surveillance for the rest of the summer. He would look out of his window in the middle of a sleepless night and see Tonks, smoking as she leaned against the lamp post across the street. And there had been many sleepless nights. Dreams had plagued him: dreams of carnage in the Underground, of burning bodies, of tile floors drenched in sticky blood. Upon waking, the distinct images would flee him, leaving only an imprint of horror in the back of his scull. After two months of drinking cups upon cups of pilfered coffee in the night to keep awake, he had inadvertently stumbled upon a solution for these nocturnal disturbances. Hermione had, half-jokingly, sent him a Dreamcatcher as a Birthday present. Her note said: _"I got this from an Inuit colony in Ontario. We're here visiting Mum's cousins. Its so strange, I never knew that there were thriving Native-American wizarding communities still in existence. I read in __A History of Magic in the Americas__ that __French wizards' diseases had managed to kill off most of the indigenous magical population. But here they are, almost in plain sight. The woman who gave me this wouldn't take my money, so we traded for my scarf and hat. She said that its supposed to be like a spider web, a filter for your dreams. You hang it over your bed, and it catches the bad dreams and lets the good ones go through. Wouldn't it be funny if it worked?"_

Funny enough, it had worked extraordinarily well. He slept soundly thereafter, but it worried him sometimes that the initially innocuous ornament now seemed to fill him with unease. He thought that he could hear it whisper quietly at night, but when he looked at it, the dreamcatcher was as silent as every other inanimate object in his room. He was thankful, nevertheless, for Hermione's uncommonly whimsical gift. Maybe he should write to her? He hadn't heard from either of his best-friends since the end of term, when they had parted with perjured cheerfulness and awkward embraces on a King's Cross platform. He could hardly blame them for their silence; they were probably waiting for him to make the first move. Last year had put a strain on their relationship, and the fault was mostly his.

Harry gave himself a mental pat on the back; wasn't admitting when you made mistakes a very adult thing to do? He had withdrawn into himself, had alternated between morbid depression and indiscriminate anger, and had rebuffed all peaceful overtures, mostly made by a distraught Hermione following some ugly scene in which he'd yell that he hated them, Dumbledore, and the entire world. Ginny Weasley had even cornered him one night in the Common Room, and demanded that he let the people who cared about him help. He'd asked her who these people were, these mysterious people who cared about him, because he didn't know any. And Ginny had whispered:_ "Me. I care about you, Harry. I always have."_

And then she'd tried to kiss him. He had watched her pale face approach in the dim light- her lips slightly parted and her eyes feverish- and panic had filled him. Such overt signs of affection had begun to unnerve him greatly, after he spent months trying to eschew emotion from his life. With a yell that startled Ginny out of her seat, he had leaped up. He must have had a look of disgust or anger, or both, on his face, because she looked both humiliated and furious as she stormed out of the room. They avoided each other for the rest of the year: she had her endless string of boyfriends and he had his solitary misery. He tuned out of the frequency of regular life; he performed in Quiddich and academics with, at most, a cursory exertion. At least they still made him captain. Ron had been really jealous.

Things were going to be better this year, Harry told himself. When he turned seventeen, he would go and stay at the Burrow with the Weasleys. He would apologize and Ron would forgive him. It would be just like old times. Hermione would make her review schedules and he would follow them, achieving the N.E.W.T.s to enter Auror training at the Ministry. The three of them would go after Voldemort, and Harry would kill him at last. And everyone would live happily ever after.

Except real life wasn't like that, Harry thought as he heard Uncle Vernon's dilapidated sedan pull into the garage. Just as the door opened, he bent over the laundry basket, feigning a singular concentration in his task. He was carefully examining a mustard stain on the front of Dudley's favorite sweater when he felt his uncle's presence right behind him.

"Aunt Petunia asked me to..."

"On the lawn, boy!" Vernon hissed. "Those...those..._your kind..._ARE STANDING ON MY LAWN!"

"I..wha..."

"SHUT _UP_! Just -go get rid of them, and when you come back, we are going to have a _discussion."_

Behind Vernon's hulking back, Duddykins pounded one large fist into a cradled hand, twice, just in case Harry missed the implication.

Muttering to himself, Dursley Senior lead Dursley Junior up the stairs- two fleshy zeppelins blocking out the light.

"Curse the wretched day I ever took him in. Nothing but bloody trouble, since the day he was born..."

When he heard the door at the top of the stairs slam shut, Harry practically stumbled across the room in excitement. Somebody had come to rescue him!

Or kidnap him.

Wait.

What if his 'visitors' were Death Eaters? Just in case,he slid his wand from his pocket, and burst out into the sunshine waving it in a decidedly sword-like, belligerent manner- and felt quite silly upon discerning that nothing awaited him more dangerous than Tonks and Remus, trailing shoe-shaped scorn on Aunt Petunia's manicured grass.

"Wotcher' Harry." Tonks grinned.

"Oh..er, sorry. 'Constant vigilance', you know."

"We're here to take you to Grimmauld," Remus Lupin told him.

"For good? But...my stuff." A note of excitement crept into Harry's voice.

"You won't need it," Remus continued. "We're taking you back after."

"After what?"

"The meeting. Considering, uh..."

"Considering the circumstances," Tonks picked up, " the Headmaster has decided to let you join early."

"Wait. Really?"

"Yes, really." Remus smiled.

Harry could have squealed for joy. At last! He'd been waiting for this for _years_. _Finally_, he would know what was going on without having to go and try to figure it our himself. This almost made up for the fact that he would be stuck at the Dursleys for six more weeks.

"Alright, we're going to Apparate. Remus will Side-Along with you. See you in a bit." She vanished.

"Remus?"

"Yes, Harry?

"Why now?"

The man considered the boy who could have been James' twin. He looked like James before the war, before things got serious, deadly. He sighed. It was starting again.

"There's been an attack."

"What?... where? Who?"

"Patience, Harry. You'll know soon enough. And it's not the kind of thing you want to hear twice."

After a nauseating moment of folding through space, the two appeared on the stoop of Number 12.

Inside, Order Members were milling about the kitchen, conversing in strained whispers. Half-empty plates of buttered toast and used tea cups were strewn across the table.

Harry looked about; he didn't know where Remus had gone, but he spotted Ron and Ginny in the corner, huddled together with the twins.

Ron looked up at him, hope dawning on his face.

"Harry, d'you know what's going on?"

"Blast. I was just about to ask you the same thing."

"Oh." Ginny's face looked pinched and worried. "We were hoping...you know. Nobody would tell us anything."

"It's not just you lot; we've no idea whats going on either." Fred piped up.

And George continued: "Maybe Ol'Moldy came down with a case of lethal Spattergroit and decided to save us all the trouble and just keel over."

Ron chortled and Ginny hissed "That's not funny, you two."

"Remus said that there was an attack..." four mouths opened to interrogate him, so he rushed to add, "but that's all I know."

Harry watched: there was Tonks, wildly gesticulating for the benefit of a furrow-browed Kingsley Shaklebolt and a worried Mr. Wealsey. Mad Eye was watching the scene, taking long droughts from his hip flask, sitting next to Minerva McGonagall and Remus Lupin, who were engaged in a vehement but quiet conversation. Diggle and Dodge were inconspicuous in the corner with two teacups and a plate of scones between them as Fleur Weasley leafed through a magazine beside her husband, who was attempting to sneak a few extra minutes of sleep face-down on the tabletop. Hestia Jones, picking grime from underneath her fingernails with a pocket knife, was being observed with silent disapproval by Mrs. Weasley, who was offering a plateful of rashers to Emeline Vance while casting suspicious looks at the five of them.

Who were the... victims? Harry wondered. He wished Hermione were here to give him some insight.

Wait a minute. Where was Hermione?

Summary: Snape has a disturbing dream about Granger in her second year. Tonks and Shaklebolt investigate the Granger house, conclude that a Death Eater attack occurred and proceed to cover up the evidence on Dumbledore's orders. Later, Harry is retrieved from the Dursleys' in order to attend a meeting of the Order, in which he has been newly inducted.

Note: 1. Granger is thirteen when she is Petrified. The scene is meant to be questionable.


	9. Tableau Vivant

Disclaimer: id.

Summarized at end.

CH 9. Tableau Vivant

"I'll be down shortly, Mrs. Weasley." Hermione spoke through the door.

"Alright, dear, you take a minute to compose yourself."

Then, footsteps, fading.

Dozens of tiny vials formed concentric circles around her kneeling form, each harboring an effervescent ribbon of memory. Unsure of how much time she had before they summoned her, Hermione had begun with the most incriminating memories, working systematically in chronological sequence, and then moved on to memories suspect for their context only. Easy enough: visualize the scene which began the unwanted incident, summon it, channel it through the wand, and stop the transference when the reel of images in the mind's eye reached the appropriate point. For only a second afterward was one aware of a _lack, _a missing link, but then the chain would melt and remould itself whole to camouflage the break. What she had just done wasn't dangerous _precisely,_ it simply wasn't _recommended._ Not to mention that her experience with memory manipulation was limited to some disjoint hypotheses scraped from miscellaneous footnotes, and an occasional _Obliviate_ performed on someone else. She hadn't labeled the vials, that was the problem. And _then_, she had removed the memory of doing what she had just done, so if she had intended any order in the placement, it was utterly obscured now.

She felt...odd. Calm, without cause.

No longer as if she were fighting a futile battle to keep the lid on a Pandora's box, and yet...her thoughts were halting and a bit confused, as though she was trying to trace a reference that she was certain existed, but could not find.

After the vials were miniaturized and stored in her pocket (with the aid of the Unbreakable and Cushioning charms), Hermione walked out of the room, blissfully unaware that her counterpart from a mere 24 hours ago would have balked at the liberties she had just taken with her most prized possession – her mind. That Hermione would have been weak-kneed with self doubt, quailing at the thought of the impending interrogation. That Hermione, standing at the top of the stairs with a clear view of The Order assembled below in the kitchen, would have seriously considered tripping on purpose.

This Hermione had a solitary focus. The facts were all there; while she had removed the memories of the actual events, the running commentary inside her head remained intact.

The beauty of the plan was that Legilimency would show the intruder visuals and feelings only. Not thoughts. The broken inkwell had become an illicit Portkey, and an invisible Puking Pastille, which she had confiscated two years ago but never gotten around to destroying, completed her arsenal, in case Veritaserum was introduced, or quick departure became necessary.

On the edge of the second floor landing, she paused, disconcerted by a sudden wave of dizziness. Her hands seemed to be...trembling?

It wasn't nerves, though, or not completely; it was Cruciatus aftershocks, which, for some inexplicable reason, had lasted more that six hours after.._.the incident._..in defiance of clear textbook reference. Or perhaps it was a collateral effect of the Navitus Potion, of which stimulant she had ingested two doses within the last twelve hours in order to stay awake through the whole night. Usually, Hermione only allowed herself to skirt overdose on the eve of final exams, but she justified that the circumstances merited an exception.

"Chance favored the prepared mind", after all.

Gathering herself around a steely resolve, Hermione walked in, drawing the eyes of every Order member in the room. It was evident that they had been told...but could they guess the truth? Would she give herself away?

She didn't have to fake the faintly panicked look she sent around, and Mrs. Weasley, just as predicted, rose to the occasion.

"Albus, the poor girl has been through an _ordeal_. And now all these _people_..."

"Quite right, Molly, quite right," Hermione was not going to look at the Headmaster, she determined. No need in making this any harder for herself. "Perhaps we should reconvene in the library, Miss Granger."

"We're coming," Harry, emerging from the corner with Ronald in tow, said with dead determination, though he provoked no argument.

"Why, yes, Harry, I rather thought you'd say that." Dumbledore smiled.

Harry came up and put his _hand _on her _shoulder, _which he absolutely never did, and it was a close thing to keep herself from flinching away as his heat inflamed her skin through her sweater and shirt.

"I'm so sorry, Hermione." Harry looked like he was about to cry.

"We all are," Ron piped up without looking her in the eye.

_Too warm. Why was it that warm?_ But the hand was gone in a mercifully brief moment; it seemed he wanted to touch her no more than she wanted to be touched. Now, Ron was giving her the puppy-eyes, begging for a good smack upside the cranium.

Harry was still staring at her. "I...this is all my fault."

_Right on cue,_ she thought.

The index card with her speech on it was burning a hole in her pocket.

"No, Harry, there's nothing you could have done. It's not."

Suddenly angry, he turned away from her, shouting: "Of course it is! It's because you're _my_ friend!"

_Predictable. _

"It's because I'm M..Muggleborn, Harry. That's what this whole s...stupid war is all about."

The look he sent her was disbelieving.

Dumbledore said: "Miss Granger is right, Harry. Lord Voldemort has never needed an excuse."

A covert look around the room revealed the expected sight- everyone was looking at Harry as if he were a volatile creature about to go berserk. Which meant they weren't looking at her. She breathed a bit easier: everyone was behaving exactly as she had hoped.

"Come along, children." Dumbledore ushered the three of them out of the kitchen and across the hall, to the library.

Harry opened the door.

Inside, Severus Snape turned from a morose contemplation of the dirty window, muttering, irritated:

"Albus..." Then, he noticed the actual identity of the intruder. "Potter! What in damnation are you doing here?" The scathing reproof he was preparing was interrupted by the Headmaster's appearance behind the shorter boy.

"We'll need to borrow the library, Severus. Miss Granger?"

Snape blanched, but the room was so dim that no one noticed his expression of utter shock.

Hermione sat heavy in a chair as Ron took up uncertain guard by the doorway. Harry withdrew to skulk in a dim corner.

With a precise flick, Dumbledore summoned a twin chair and placed it opposite Hermione's. Carefully, he sat down and studied her. After a moment, he began in a soft voice:

"Miss Granger. Please tell us what happened. I understand how difficult this must be, and I promise that you will not have to tell the story more than once."

This was _it_, the moment of truth. Well, not so much truth...omission, maybe. Convincing the Headmaster would be the monumental hurdle; but, she noted with a small drop in panic, neither his tone nor his posture were accusing. Still, her wand was clutched in a desperate sweaty grip beneath the folds of her robe; she was outnumbered two-to-one. Harry and Ron didn't count. Visualizing the wreck her house had become, in case he was a nonverbal Legilimens, she looked up at the headmaster.

"I...I went to my grandparents'..."

"I thought you were going to your parents'." Harry said, from the corner, voice laced with suppressed anger, thought it was anger directed at himself.

"I was. I was there until yesterday. Morning. Then I Apparated to Suffolk. When I got back today...to my house...it was, it...um..."

"Get on with it, girl," Snape snarled from within the part of the library left in utter darkness, having hardly come to terms with the vision of the dead Hermione Granger sitting perfectly unharmed before his eyes. Highly suspicions. With a razor sharp sense for deception derived from a mastery of it, he could tell that she was lying. Lying while looking and seeming perfectly genuine. And therein lay the problem, for Hermione Granger, as everyone knew, was an atrocious liar. With each passing moment, the explanations his brain concocted became exponentially more convoluted and less plausible. In any circumstance, this spelled disaster for his position, specifically his mask of innocence.

"Severus," Dumbledore reproached.

"A-and...t-then..a..." She stalled and tried not to panic, realizing that she had forgotten the next line.

"Perhaps you'd like nothing better than to sit here all morning as Miss Granger attempts to string her vowels together, but I have matters to attend to, Headmaster." Fear made him angry. And he felt that fear acutely. The poignancy of emotions was his least favorite thing about being sober.

After throwing a glance at the hidden Professor, Dumbledore decided to take pity on her.

"Yes, Miss Granger. Ms. Tonks and Mr. Shaklebolt have been there. I regret to inform you that we could not locate your parents. I am so sorry child."

She studied the wool pattern of the robes on her lap.

"Oh."

_Cry, dammit. This is the place where you fucking _**cry**, Hermione thought viciously.

What the hell was wrong with her?

The place where the images of her parent's bodies should have been was a blank page in her mind, and the images of their living faces didn't make her sad at all. She really was monstrous, utterly monstrous.

_Think of something really sad. _

The image of Winky the house elf begging forgiveness form Barty Crouch that night at the World Cup, which had never failed to make her upset, flitted before her treacherous eyes, which remained stubbornly dry.

Improvisation saved her: she raised a trembling hand- the one that wasn't desperately clutching her wand- to her mouth, and murmured "Oh, my God" in a voice sodden with misery. This she followed with a succession of deep panicked breaths.

"Thank-you, child. Perhaps you should rest now," Dumbledore said. Age perhaps, or war, had made him cynical, but he had an uneasy feeling about the situation. Someone was deliberately concealing the truth. But he let go of the instinct and turned to logic, which dictated that if deception was being perpetrated at this moment in this room, surely Severus Snape was its source.

Hermione, unable to look at the Headmaster, not even once more, not ever again, nodded and rose.

_It was over. Thank God. _Her knees had gone weak with relief.

She was half way to the door before a voice stopped her.

"Wait," Snape said, and she had never loathed him as much, never wished more for his imminent demise than she did in that moment.

_Vile, putrescent..._

"I am not quite certain that Miss Granger has told us everything of relevance."

_sorry excuse...._

"What are you implying, Professor Snape?" Dumbledore asked, giving away nothing by his tone, much to Hermione's dismay, though, suspecting, within the privacy of his mind, that an elaborate ruse was being laid out right in front of him.

_slimy creature...._

"I am merely suggesting the possibility that Miss Granger is lying. The Imperius curse can have that effect."

Only the wall saw Hermione's horrified expression before she squelched it and turned to regard the assembled.

"What? That's not possible!" Harry said, outraged.

"No one asked you, Potter. Ah, but I shouldn't be surprised. When has that ever been a deterrent?" Snape sneered. "The Headmaster has been generous enough to allow your presence, but that does not give you license to inflict your misguided opinions on the rest of us. You give the girl too much credit, Albus, to take her at her word. I assume no one has checked her memories for tampering?" Snape was entertaining the notion that the girl was actually Antonin Dolohov polyjuiced to look like Granger when Occam's razor dropped.

"What are you saying, Snape?" Harry growled, and Hermione, filled with a fondness so painful she could have cried, was about to reprimand him with "Professor Snape, Harry!" when the Headmaster beat her to it.

"Do elaborate," Dumbledore continued. All eyes were on the Potions professor.

"I have a hypothesis, Headmaster: say- purely for the sake of conjecture- that when Granger arrived at her house, she did not find it deserted as she now claims, but was met, instead, by Death Eaters, to whom she proceeded to give information-"

"I would NEVER-" _How bloody __**dare**__ he? _She would rather die then...

"Do keep that shrill voice of yours at a civilized decibel, Miss Granger. I am in no condition this morning to deal with the histrionics of a teenage girl." The abysmal hangover and the dream of her his brain refused to forget made him want to wring Granger's impertinent neck. "Perhaps they made it difficult for her to refuse. Afterward, she was promptly Obliviated, Imperiused, and returned here to aid in further sabotage."

"Headmaster, that is _not_ true." A small part of her which the rest absolutely refused to acknowledge at that moment was gleefully smug at the turn events had taken in actuality.

_"See what happens when you underestimate me?"_

_"Shut up!"_

_"You might want to show a little respect. I saved your ungrateful skin, you know."_

"Precisely what they would direct her to say."

"Please, Severus, Miss Granger, there is a very simple way to verify this." The Headmaster turned to her. "I'm sure a student as diligent as yourself is aware that _Obliviate _leaves a very distinct mark in the conscious, as does _Imperius._" Now, he turned to the professor. "At least for one who knows how to look for it."

"Indeed, Headmaster,"Snape deferred.

If she hadn't predicted and prepared for it, Snape's cat-quick wand-draw and "Legilimens" would have caught her off guard. With the discordant sensation of a disc spun the wrong way on the turntable, she felt him edge his way into her mind, where the pre-arranged memory sequence awaited his perusal.

_Hermione walking up the pathway to her house. Her mother's blurred face on the other side of the window. _

_Sitting in the entry as her parents stood together on the stairs, watching her unlace her sneakers. _

_Father handing her the platter of roast chicken at dinner. _

_Standing in the street outside, and the next moment, reappearing on the porch of an old Victorian. Embraces, her grandparents, gray haired and aged since she saw them last. Reappearing at home, ruined, burnt. Screaming hoarse, running through. No one. _

_Then, No. 12. Molly Weasley's warm embrace._

Snape was utterly surprised that there was no trace of Obliviate, which revealed itself as a staticky interlude between undamaged memories, nor of the Imperius, which lent the images a sickly sallow glow. So surprised, in fact, that he did the unthinkable and admitted the possibility that he may have missed something, and, returning to the beginning of the sequence, began to study it again with increased concentration. All the memories positively reeked of _guilt. _But why?

Just then, Snape was forcibly extracted from his pursuit by the rough hand of Harry Potter.

"You can't just _do_ that! You didn't even give her a warning!"

"Release me this instant, Potter, or you will sorely regret it!" Snape screeched, wand turned from the girl onto the little miscreant.

"Headmaster, get the boy out of here."

"Headmaster, he used to do the same thing when he was supposed to be teaching me Occlumency."

They spoke simultaneously.

Between the two seething boys, Mr. Weasley looking terribly confused in the corner, and Miss. Granger's ashen unfocused face, Dumbledore thought that it was high time to diffuse the situation.

He rose to an impressive taffeta clad height.

"Mr. Weasley. Mr. Potter. Your friend appears as if she could use some rest. Kindly escort her to her room."

Dumbledore waited until the door had closed behind the three students before he turned to the Potions Master.

"Headmaster, I'm sure that there's-"

The older wizard stopped him with a raised hand.

"Not now. This is a strange matter; we'll agree on that point. You had no knowledge of this prior?"

Snape's wand hand twitched, but his face was like stone.

"Absolutely not."

Dumbledore's eyes were not twinkling.

"Very well. I shall contact you this evening. Please-" He opened the door for Snape and both saw, though neither was surprised, the entire Order assembled in the hall outside the library.

"Molly, Remus, join me please."

The two retreated into the room with the Headmaster, leaving Snape facing off against a dozen hostile faces.

Utter silence reigned in the corridor.

"Had a good laugh with your Death Eater buddies, did you?"

Moody. Of course.

"Funny you should ask. I'm not the Head of Defense, am I now?" But it wasn't only Moody whose glare was attempting to dissolve him into a puddle of acid on the carpet.

"Maybe you should be, seeing as you're utter rubbish as a spy." Tonks.

"That's right. What are you good for if you can't even warn us about an attack?" Diggle.

"What zoes 'ahn expect from zuch an 'orrible man?" The French one.

Despite their invective and death stares, no one dared come within five feet of him.

With a derisive snort, he turned and walked away from the gaggle of idiots.

"Slinking back to lick your Master's boots?" Moody's rasp followed him down the corridor, ignored.

"Don't you walk away from me when I'm talking to you! SNAPE!"

But the spy was already gone.

* * *

The boys, in an unprecedented show of gallantry, walked her to her room.

"I can't believe Snape did that. What a fucking git," Harry snarled, thought his raving anger had simmered down.

"Do you...um, need anything?" Ron asked, visibly uncomfortable with her perceived distress, but clearly making an effort nonetheless.

"Yeah," Harry agreed,"we're here for you if you need anything."

She looked between the two, frightened and restless as they were, trying to offer comfort while committing to nothing, attempting to extricate themselves as soon as possible while sincerely promising their support...

Frustration, guilt, and that same hopeless fondness surged within her, and before she could exercise some restraint, she had leaped upon them both with tears in her eyes.

"I love you two, do you know that?" she wailed, completing her humiliation.

"We love you too, 'Mione." Ron smiled, a little sheepish. If wasn't the first time, after all, that she had made an utter fool of herself by sobbing all over them, Hermione thought.

"Umm..." Harry eyed her door uncertainly, and she decided to let them off the hook.

"I need to be alone right now."

"OK, but hey," Harry said, eying her with concern,"we're right next door. See you at lunch, maybe?"

"Sure. Maybe."

Shutting the door of her empty room, Hermione fell against it and slid to the floor.

All in all, she had been incredibly lucky. The volatile mixture of Harry and Professor Snape in the same room had created a smoke screen for her deception.

Surely the law of averages would kill her luck soon. But perhaps she had a Dark guardian Angel. Either way, this success would cost her.

As she moved to level herself off the floor, the memory vials jangled in her robe pocket. She should replace the memories, but...

She was just so _exhausted_, and having those images in her head was not compatible with rest of any kind.

* * *

Summary: After removing some of her memories, Granger reports on the attack to Dumbledore, who believes her version of events. Snape has doubts, but he finds nothing suspiciouus upon performing Legilimency on Granger. The remainder of the Order believe that Snape was negligent in failing to prevent the Muggles' deaths.


End file.
